Scheduling live pair programming events

As mentioned in another post, I've started to run live pair programming events. Scheduling one take quite some work. Let me describe it here so maybe I can think of ways to reduce the overhead.

Find the pair programming partner.

The easier way is to reach out to people I know from my time attending Perl events in Europe and the US or to people I know from the Python events in Israel. A much harder way is to reach out to people who are working in other languages. For example Go and JavaScript are on my immediate radar, but others are going to be interesting too.

I still have to work a lot on finding a diverse set of partners.

In either case it needs some email exchanges to get someone on board. I hope it will be easier once (and if) the videos get some traction.

Find a time slot that's good for both of us.

This too requires a few back-and-forth emails. It is much easier if it is a recurring partner and now I even started to schedule more than one event with the same person. This certainly make things easier.

At the beginning I wanted to have a time slot that's also good for any potential audience, but it seems there are a lot more people watching the video recording than the live session so now my main concern is to make it convenient for the two of us.

Zoom, web page, calendar

The items that most likely can be automated.

• Create a Zoom meeting session and copy the invitation link (reuse an existing event if this is a series of events).
• Create a web page either on the PerlMaven site if it is about a Perl-based project or the Code Maven site for everything else.
• Add link to the page listing all the events
• Add the event to the calendar JSON file.
• If it is in Hebrew then add it to the Code-Mavens Meetup group (Maybe I should also add the English events as well.)

Announcements

That's a lot of other can of worms. Where really should I announce this?