Virtual workshops in English

Others get their ideas while in shower, I get them while on a flight without Internet access.

During the last flight I took from Israel to Hungary I thought about starting to run online virtual workshops.

I really don't know why didn't I start doing these earlier. After all I ran quite a lot of in-person workshops before COVID and I taught quite a few courses via Zoom after COVID started. Even now I am teaching a Python course via Zoom.

Anyway, better late than never, right?

12 days ago I scheduled the first workshop and today I scheduled the 7th workshop. Here is the list.

You see, when I start doing something I jump deep into it.

Plans: 3 languages

So what are my plans with the workshops? At first I thought I'll exclusively offer workshops in Rust as I have very high hopes with that language, but then I changed my mind and decided to start experimenting with workshops in the 3 programming languages I know the best.

Perl

I think it has the smallest community of the 3 groups and unfortunately it is steadily declining in its popularity: I had hardly any request for Perl courses in the past 5 years. Despite that I still run the Perl Weekly newsletter with more that 4,000 subscribers. There is also the Perl Community on Facebook with 1,600 members and I also have the Perl Maven page on LinkedIn with 849 followers. So there is some interest and I have a way to promote the events to potential participants.

Likely I'll offer workshops in topics such as GitHub pages, GitHub Actions, Docker, Pull-Requests for Perl developers and less coding in Perl. Maybe there will be a few other people who will want to use the platform to talk about other topics in Perl.

I will probably run a workshop on the use of one-liners and regexes that can be interesting for people who are not familiar with Perl, but for that the primary audience will be people who are not familiar with Perl.

Rust

I think there are a lot more people writing in Rust than in Perl and I am sure there are a lot more who would like to learn Rust that those who would like to learn Perl. I also think that Rust will gain a lot in popularity.

As for my capability to promote the workshops: I've been participating both in the Rust programming language group on Facebook (3,400 members) and in th Rust Programming Language group on LinkedIn (24,000 members). I think in both I have enough credits so they won't mind if I mention the free Rust-related workshops. There is also the This Week in Rust newsletter where the editors are happy to include these workshops in the listings. I event posted on Reddit and while it did not receive standing ovation, I also did not see anyone complaining. So I guess I can post about the workshops once in a while.

Python

It has by far the biggest community in the world. (at least among these 3 languages). So it might have the biggest potential to attract participants. Unfortunately I don't really have a way to promote the events to a community. I have access to the PyWeb community in Israel (3,333 members) which is a good start. However, I have not participated in any Python group. Neither on Facebook nor on LinkedIn. (The two platforms I am using) I can ask the editors of Python Weekly and PyCoders (with 103,000 subscribers), but I am not sure they will include a link to any of my events. I will have to put in a lot more thought and energy reaching the Python programmers who might be interested in my workshops.

Plans: Frequency

I looked at a number of other Meetup groups. Especially at groups with more than 10,000 members. Some of them have several events every week. Most of them are located in cities with a lot of people. (e.g. London, New York, Los Angeles)

For now I started with 2 events every week. The first will be on June 6 and as I wrote above, I've already scheduled 7. When I started 12 days ago I did not want to wait too much, but I also did not want to have too little time for people to sign up. So I scheduled the events 2 weeks ahead.

I think I'll have to schedule them a little more in advance. Maybe a month in advance. For that I'll probably have to first fill the weeks up till the next month. On the other hand I don't want to add several events on the same day. I want to have some gaps between so the people who are in the Code-Mavens group won't be overwhelmed. So I guess I'll add one event every second day during the next few days and then I can get back to adding one event every 3-4 days.

I also have some in-person events about Python in the Israeli Python group and about Rust in the Code-Mavens group. I have to leave time for those as well. Another issue is if I should create a separate group for the Rust meetings in Israel.

Expectations in terms of popularity

I really have no idea what to expect in terms of popularity of the events. I know the current Zoom license allows up to 100 participants. It is a totally arbitrary number to aim for, and it is unclear if it even possible to reach that number of participants. Would people sign up if they already see 100 people registered? We'll see. Maybe more people will sign up if I provide a presentation and not a workshop. I'll also have to experiment with the day and the time, and of course with the topics.

So let's set 100 participants as the goal for the event. (Actually, if many more people would like to participate I could even broadcast it on YouTube. That's another story.) For 100 participants I will probably need 2-300 people to register to each event.

I am sure at the beginning I'll be far from such numbers. Today, 12 days after I published the first event and 3 days before it is scheduled to take place there are 46 registered attendees. The other events have 24-28 registered attendees.

Based on this, a more realistic goal for the next 3 months (till the end of August) is to reach the point where there are 100 registered attendees and 30 actually show up.

Even that might be too high an expectation given these are the summer months on the northern hemisphere where most of the potential attendees live.

When I started this 12 days ago (on 2024.05.21) the Code Mavens group had 2,681 members. Now (on 2024.06.03) there are 2,787. An increase of 106 in the number of members. I was hoping to get 25 new people each event and given 8 events a month that would average 200 new members a month. I really have no idea if this is a reasonable growth. I guess I'll see a few months from now after I ran a few of the events. If I have to set a goal with a time as the "business people" expect then I should set it to gain 600 new members till the end of August. That is, to reach 3,387 members.

Now that I wrote this down this sounds way to ambitious.

What do I gain from this? "The business model"

This of course is quite an important question and probably this should be the first thing to address, not the last one.

What do I gain from offering free presentations and/or workshops?

A couple of thoughts:

  • More people will know me and my services. That can bring in invitations to run courses at companies.
  • Some people and later maybe some companies might decide to sponsor me. I have quite high hopes for this, though I think they are rather baseless.
  • I might record some of the presentations and share them on YouTube. That can bring in more visitors, more followers, and thus more sponsors or clients.
  • I can explore new ways of presenting the material and I can practice new materials before I start offering them to my clients.

I think that's it. I think these are the "business goals" of offering free presentations and workshops.