Recently we organized our first TDD meetup in Andorra. It was held in Andorra la Vella, in a famous SPA center – Caldea. You may think that it’s weird organizing a tech meetup in a such place, but
we had a fantastic Pyrenees view and people really enjoyed it. We had catering and cameras, so that everything has been recorded.
WHO CAME TO OUR MEETUP ?
People from the IT world: developers, CTOs, software architects, product managers and other people, who didn’t want to lose this opportunity to share the experience and find something new, that could help them to move their project to the next level and have working software, always.
If someone doesn’t know, there are only 80 000 inhabitants and of course people are interested in meeting other people from other countries to know more how other IT guys do it in other countries of Europe and Asia, what methodology do they use, how they become Agile and what is the best way to achieve scalability.
Now, when you have an idea how it was, let’s talk about the meetup itself – 3 hours of presentation, question and answer session and networking!
Usually people, who come to Tech meetups want to share their experience, ask questions related to their area of expertise and clarify doubts that affect them. There are people though who come to meetups just because they love the topic – their hobby and they just want to know about it more and there are people who attend meetups for their job purposes to see other efficient ways of managing the project and learn new tools that save time, money and resources.
Selecting the topic didn’t take us that much time, I would say it was easy:
AGILE & TDD
We strongly believe that Agile goes together with TDD therefore we decided to put emphasis on TDD as not all of IT guys are familiar with what is TDD and what benefits it gives to the projects.
As all people have different background, we decided to do the presentation that would be understood by any kind of IT guy : we showed all the potential that the company, person or a team could gain just by being Agile. We went benefit by benefit of Agile Methodologies to make it clear for the attendees, that now being Agile is a must as you need to adapt to the constantly changing market and right now it changes extremely fast!
First 2 hours it was a complete silence in the room except laughs sometimes as our CTO has a good sense of humor. He showed examples that he faced in real time and public laughed about it, we took it as a good sign as these examples were of the companies that were not Agile, so attendees agreed that Agile is an essential part of our lives now.
People took notes, took pictures of the slides and listened really carefully to what we were saying. Xavi and me, we were very enthusiastic about this topic and we couldn’t stop giving tips, examples and share our experience with real projects.
We had a success! We really enjoyed it! After our presentation there were two columns of people willing to ask questions about Agile and TDD, about Apiumtech and about our personal experience. We would spend even more than 3 hours, but Caldea guys had another event after us and we needed to leave.
This meetup not only allowed us to share the experience in this area, but also meet other interesting people, other experts and promising developers!
At the end we were more than happy as Directors of Andorra’s companies were willing to meet us again to discuss potential project that they have for us.
It is a pleasure to organize meetups in such a welcoming country!
