In the last blog post, I talked about the “Homestead release knowledge gap” which led to think about organise a study group.

I came up with the study group idea just a few days before London Ethereum Meetup which is very popular meetup and its 150 capacity filled up within a few hours of the meetup announcement.

I was lucky enough to be able to register the event and I also noticed that they were looking for a few ‘flash presentation’. When I contacted the organiser if I can talk about the meetup, the organiser quickly responded saying there is one spot left.

At this point, I actually did not have anything. I quickly created a meetup page, github repo, and gitter chat channel.

During the meetup , I did a flash talk towards the end , asking how many people in the meetup have been coding with Ethereum. I think less than 30% of people raised hands. I also asked how many people have been coding for more than a year, which was a bit silly question because Ethereum itself has only been open to public for last several months, though handful of people raised hands.

A handful of Ethereum experts who’s been coding more than a year

It seems like Ethereum is still a very young ecosystem so you are regarded as “expert” even with 3 months of coding experience.

I also mentioned that our study group is “paid event” because of following reasons.

We have limited space so I wanted to restrict to smaller number of motivated people who are willing to pay small amount (£5)

I am using the office of my employer(insurance company) as a venue, so it’s easier to get cooperation/permission if this event is to help Whizz-Kids, a UK charity for disabled children which our company supports.

I am currently fund raising for my 5 days sahara trekking challenge to support Whizz-Kids, and this will incentivise me to organise the meetup more regularly.

I think I generally had positive responses and several people talked to me afterwords and actually signed up the event.

On the day of the codeup, 7 people turned up. I think it’s a pretty good size to start with. Here is the quick summary of the event.

Everybody except I had environment setup on Ubuntu (even people with Mac). Apparently Ethereum tools are mainly developed in Ubuntu and cross compiled into other platform, so it is the most reliable environment.

Most people started Ethereum before Homestead release. I had a feedback that it was interesting to see my video walkthrough posts because they haven’t used the Ethereum Wallet yet.

3 of the participants were actually writing Ethereum at work (including Proof Of Concepts), which is great.

Steve and Francesco R mentioned that they use their own private test network using genesis blocks rather than using testnet.

Andy from London Ethereum meetup helped some of us installing jaxx.io , Bitcoin and Ethereum Wallet. He also donated to the event in Ether!!

Francesco C showed us one of his Hackathon projects InsurETH, which lets you insure your flight directly with an ethereum smart contract.

Francesco C also showed us his own Blockchain App development micro-framework called bapp

To be honest, I was the one of the newest among participants so I learnt a lot. Also we managed to raise close to £90 for Whizz-kids which exceeded my expectation.

I am hoping to organise this study group more regularly and the next one will be on 21st April. I am looking forward to meeting more people and study together.