The meetup attracted a peak audience of 101 viewers (124 according to StreamYard) with an average of 88 viewers. Participants actively engaged through chat, contributing 273 messages with comments, questions, and answers. Following the live event, the video garnered 1033 on-demand views with a total watch time of 78 hours. Additionally, the YouTube channel received 8.7k impressions (90% from recommendations) and gained 237 subscribers.
What worked well?
Strong Initial Interest: The high viewership and watch time for the on-demand recording demonstrate significant interest in the topic.
Engaged Audience: Active participation through chat messages indicates a well-received event.
What can we do better?
Interactive Presentations: Including live demos in future presentations can potentially increase audience engagement.
Promotion Strategy: Look at more opportunities to promote the meetup on social networks.
Speaker Diversity: Future speaker selection will prioritize building a diverse and inclusive panel in terms of background and experience.
Next Steps
The next meetup is planned for the end of June. We welcome suggestions for talks and project presentations to share with the community.
Social media feedback
Here are some messages received on Mastodon and YouTube
Thanks for setting this up, great initiative. I have been involved with OSS language communities for a couple decades now and it is always dispiriting how few use either established methods or new tools like this to spread awareness, unlike the few happy exceptions like Zig and despite the great success of the Rails demo video back then.
I watched half of the recording last week and I think Jim fell into the common speaker trap I see at all conferences of getting too much into the weeds of their particular tech and not focusing on more general concerns that the audience is more interested in, in this case what was Jim's experience of using Swift to implement their tech, which the audience then thankfully brought him back on track to in the Q&A. It would help if you guys would point this out to speakers and vet speakers' slides first for this common weakness (send the slides to me if you don't have time to do it!).
Don't get me wrong: Jim's an interesting company and usecase, but IMO his talk should've been half about what their company does in more general terms and half what the Q&A ended up about, ie what was their practical experience of using Swift outside Apple platforms.
Where he did address the language, with his hammer analogy, it wasn't reasoned enough: he should probably have had a slide on what particular features of Swift allowed him to use it so widely, instead of just shrugging that it is the tool he knows. I think it was great that he was honest about that, as developer familiarity is a worthwhile argument, but there were no doubt other important technical factors that made it feasible too.
Looking forward to watching the second half and more videos in the future, I hope we can get more of the Swift core team and WG members to come on in the future.
In the stream, there was the mention of a Swift Open Source Slack. I haven’t been able to find a link to it in the video chat or the comments. Any chance it can be provided (again) here or in the video description, @sebsto?
