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For me, it all started with Tagmint, a wannabe startup with Peter. Clearly, it was a failure, but also source of great experience. We started using Node there and it was love at first sight — it was not easy at first, we knew nobody among our friends, who used it before.

Project after project was finished using Node — still nobody was around us to support Node.js learning and sharing. No meetup groups existed in Hungary, no conferences. It was time to change this.

Node was/is relatively new in the Hungarian tech scene with only a few of companies using it in production. These companies are mostly small startups. Only a few bigger ones use it, usually for tooling purposes. It is time to change this too.

Nodebp begins

The Nodebp logo

Just looked up my mailbox: it all started in Sept, 2013 when Peter and I were thinking about doing an event/conference about Node, and we got en email from Tamas and Robi (we got introduced to them a few months back) saying that they had the same thing in mind. The next thing was to go to ruin pubs to brainstorm. After two sessions with beers, we decided to start the Nodebp meetup group and formed a community around it.

At these meetings, we set the standards that we wanted to see in action on how our meetups should be:

branding: we have an integrated appearance on all channels

use of GitHub: we use it to track CFPs and past events

the format

teaching/learning: we plan to educate people

How our meetups look

We hold them monthly with three talks if possible:

beginner/lightning talk, just to get the night started deep-dive into a specific area fun talk, like brewing beer with Node.js, or fighting nodebots

All of them are twenty minutes long or so with a five minute break in between.

Nodebp November, 2013

After the talks we let the folks do some networking, then we head out to a nearby pub to share even more cool stories and learn from each other.

Note: we always have cold beer at the venue too;)

All our meetups are recorded, and can be viewed on YouTube. In our January session _nec talked about Building desktop applications with node.js which was featured in node weekly. Congrats!

“Building desktop applications with node.js” was featured in nodeweekly

So, do you want to speak up too? Just submit an issue in our GitHub repo!

We did this from scratch. None of us had any experience in building communities/meetup groups before. It was quite a hard job to make the first meetup happen. It would have failed without the contributions we got from our friends and sponsors. Also, special thanks to Tamas, our awesome designer.