Check out this book called The 2 Hour Cocktail Party. I used it as structure to host a small get together last week and it was a lot fun!
I think as other comments allude to scheduling can be really hard so its a good idea to start sending out invitations 2-3 weeks in advance. Also don't be afraid to invite old friends - I reconnected with some friends I haven't talked to in 7+ years and it was great
I'm working on a project where I launch something every week this year. Here's my process:
* Create a notepad in your phone and throw any and all ideas in there whenever they come up
* Choose one to work on this weekend - whichever excites you the most
* When working on the project, be careful of scope creep. Accept your project will do one thing, and one thing only. Also accept your project will probably be crap - that's ok, you just need to something to start with so you can begin building on top of it next weekend
* Start with technology you're very comfortable with - whatever that may be. Then learn whatever else you need to learn as you work on the project
* Reuse code from past projects
* Force yourself to launch by the end of the weekend. This restraint will force you to be creative with your approach to building, and launching is always a great morale boost
* gives event planners data points to attract more/higher quality sponsors
Imagine what your local dev meetup organizers could do if they had more funding (free arduinos? Fly out Woz? Hand out AWS credits?)
I designed the feedback form to be completeable in under 15 seconds, while giving good data to event planners. You don’t even need to provide your name. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for an event planner to ask 3 questions in order to provide some photos - photos you can use to build your personal brand, post on dating sites, cherish as memories, etc.
> I have a sort spot for the folks at Twilio, because they were actually the ones who convinced us to do ads on Read the Docs originally, with a hacked together campaign way back in like 2015
This sounds really interesting! I find it fascinating that Twilio was willing to do such a personalized project with a relatively small company. Would you be willing to share the story?
Specific curiosities:
* Did you reach out to them, or did they reach out to you?
* Who were you working with there? (someone in a business unit, or someone in engineering?)
* Twilio is huge with (I imagine) big reputation risk. Why were they okay with being such early adopters?
* What was the process like working with them through this campaign?
Looks like it was 2015. We did a fundraising campaign on our site (wrapup blog post here: https://blog.readthedocs.com/fundraising-wrapup/), which was our first big attempt at fundraising. To be 100% honest, we didn't reach our goal, and we padded the numbers with a Python Software Foundation grant, and the Twilio ad sponsorship to not fail in public. We were doing millions of pageviews a month at that point, but had a lot of failure around fundraising. More info on the burnout and sadness of that period here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve... -- but moving on to the happy ending :)
The Twilio folks reached out as part of that campaign. Specifically it was Rob Spectre, who I think was very forward thinking about their developer outreach at the time. They wanted to sponsor us, and in return we promote the upcoming events & blog posts they were doing.
It was very lightweight to start. I think we filled out their "event sponsorship" form, they gave us the money, and we put some images & copy in the sidebar of the docs using our theme.
I think they were willing to do this because they saw the massive opportunity of the channel we had. We've been able to build a business that supports a team with almost the exact concept they pitched to us, so the value seems obvious in retrospect.
I like Supabase's SaaS model because I don't have to worry about infra work; I can just build.
Maybe eventually I'll have to explore other options, but for now my projects are still small enough where their feature set meet my needs. I think $25/mo is well worth it, knowing:
1. I can spin up a db & auth for a new project without having to spend hours on configuration & deployment
2. I can sleep well at night not worrying about one faulty line of code bringing down my entire app
I look at a bunch of company dev blogs for my side project[0].
IMO don't use Medium as its tough for content exploration as a user.
I think the best option is to setup a static site generator using whatever tool works for you - ideally a tool that allows your users to search for blog posts, and filter posts by tags.
I would probably start with Wordpress to quickly get started, and explore other options as needs arise.
I think as other comments allude to scheduling can be really hard so its a good idea to start sending out invitations 2-3 weeks in advance. Also don't be afraid to invite old friends - I reconnected with some friends I haven't talked to in 7+ years and it was great