Tech Meetups NG Bot

Keep up with tech meetups you'll love, Give feedback to meetups organizers, all on Messenger.

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Inspiration

Two things: single source of truth for tech meetups and helping tech meetups get better by getting feedback from attendees.

As a regular techie, keeping up with tech events you would want to attend in Lagos, Nigeria isn't very easy. There is a lot of meetups, a lot of noise, a lot going on. Fortunately, this seem to be the case in most major cities in the world.

On the other hand, organizers of tech meetups find it very difficult to get feedback from people who attend their meetups. Less than 10% of surveys sent out are filled.

What it does

techmeetupsng-bot keeps you up to date with tech meetups, and makes it super easy to give feedback

How we built it

TechMeetupsNG isn't just a messenger bot. It's a system. We first started a twitter handle to gauge how much people loved the idea. Next followed a facebook page. And then the bot.

The bot is built with node and express at it's backend, ejs as templating engine and React as client. To keep meetups dynamically maintained, we built a ruby on rails api with an admin interface to manage/update records.

Most of the design decisions on the messenger bot are tailored to what people've told us they want.

Challenges we ran into

  • Knowledge on building bots - We weren't experts
  • Just one dev on the team

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We tackled the problems from a people-first, not an app-first perspective. Building users even before we had a product was amazing.
  • Our team is made up of just one dev. The other members of the team have proven how important it is to have a diverse team.

What we learned

Taking time to understand the people your product/service will be serving is really important

What's next for Tech Meetups NG Bot

  1. A website, with the bot embedded. That's following right next to this.
  2. A way to collate and distribute all feedback received in a way that tech meetups organizers can learn from each other and improve the impact they have on tech ecosystems.
  3. Aggregating the data gathered from registered devs to give reports that truly represents the developer numeric strength and expertise of Nigeria, and any other country we find adoption.
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