Are you Deutsch? You can read this article in German here: Online- oder Offline-Meetups?

I used to be such a great fan of meetups, I even volunteered to become one of the organizers of the Cologne Web Performance Optimization group in 2020. Due to the pandemic, I only ever organized virtual events for that meetup, taking advantage of the possibility to invite people from overseas. But I stopped attending virtual meetups as I did not like sitting in front of my computer staring at the laptop screen after a workday as a web developer.

There have been a few exceptions, like Stay Curious, CSS Café, UXchange, Sustainable Offsite Meeting, and, most recently, Creatives for Future. The image above shows my laptop before joining the meetup.

But this week I have been very happy to join a real-life in-person meetup again after over 2 years. I have been to three actual in-person conferences in the meantime, but I always liked the spontaneous after-work aspect of actual meetups, and here we go again: Green Coding organized a meetup at Betahaus, and I was lucky to be in Berlin and find out in time, so I could meet actual people and make new friends, besides joining a professional discussion, learning something new, and drinking some beer on a warm evening in Spring 2022.

In NRW, some of the meetups taking a break due to covid have organized outdoor events this summer, like WebWorkerNRW in Düsseldorf and uXChange in Cologne, while in Berlin the new JavaScript Tech Group has been founded for learning and sharing knowledge every Tuesday evening in Moabit, not far from Berlin central station.

After two years of online meetups, we also see more hybrid events: taking place at an actual location, with an additional video meeting, chat, or live stream for the people that cannot come to the actual venue. So there is the human aspect of meeting in real life, the spontaneous talks, eating together, laughing together, clapping hands together, but we don’t want to give up the opportunity to invite speakers from outside our regional scene. As a remote participant, it still feels better to see and hear a crowd instead of everyone sitting alone at their desks, and it probably inspires people to visit actual events again if they can.

Let’s hope we can go on and revive the meetup scene!