What do you get from organizing engineering meetups besides extra work? After organizing several of them, I have a few answers.
The latest meetup in April 2026.
Over three years at Manychat, I switched teams a few times and got to know a lot of engineers across the company. Still, I often learned about interesting technical projects completely by accident.
We had sprint reviews, of course, but they’re focused on product progress. The engineering stories behind the work rarely make it onto the agenda.
At some point, I got tired of relying on luck. We already had engineering communities, and when an opportunity came up to get more involved in the frontend one, I saw it as a chance to create a place where engineers from different disciplines could share what they were building and learn from each other.
Before starting, I had a long conversation with my manager. It forced me to think more carefully about why I wanted to do this in the first place: what value it would bring, not only to the company and the team, but also to me personally.
That question stayed with me. Five meetups later, with the sixth coming at the end of June, I think I have an answer.
I’mEgor, Frontend Techlead at Manychat. In this article, I won’t talk about why engineering communities are good for companies. Instead, I want to share what running one can give you as an engineer.
Building your network
When I joined Manychat, there were about 15 frontend engineers. I knew all of them. Today the company has more than 400 people, and that’s simply no longer possible.
We have Slack channels for introductions. Every new hire gets a welcome message. The problem is that someone new joins almost every day. Reading an introduction is easy. Actually getting to know people is much harder. If you’re not working on the same project, you may never interact at all. As systems grow, repositories split, and teams become more specialized, that becomes even more likely.
Organizing a meetup gives you a legitimate reason to talk to people you’d otherwise never meet. You learn what another team is building, what problems they’re solving, and which shortcuts they’ve already discovered.
Without these conversations, people slowly disappear into their own corners of the company. Important knowledge becomes local knowledge.
Our first offline meetup in July 2025.
Building soft skills
Ordering food, booking a room, finding a clicker that actually works, that’s the easy part (and can also be delegated). The harder part starts when you need people.
Most engineers spend their day talking to the same handful of people. Community work is different. Suddenly you’re asking strangers for favors: to share their work and knowledge, to spend their time preparing a talk, and finally to stand in front of a room full of colleagues and explain something they normally only discuss with their team. You have no authority over them, no leverage, no budget. Just your ability to explain why it matters and why it’s worth their time.
And then there are all the people outside engineering. Running a meetup means asking for budget, finding time in people’s schedules, promoting events, and getting organizational support. That usually involves managers, HR, and various stakeholders. They care about different things than engineers do. Learning how to explain the same initiative to different audiences is a useful skill on its own.
That turns out to be surprisingly useful practice for all kinds of soft skills. The era of highly paid engineers who can quietly ship tickets and avoid people altogether seems to be ending.
Whether you want to become a tech lead, an engineering manager, or simply a stronger engineer, your ability to work with people matters more every year. Running a community gives you a place to practice at low stakes.
And one more bonus. When you organize events, bring people together, and keep things moving, colleagues start associating you with ownership. You’re no longer just the person working on a specific project. You’re the person making something happen because you care.
Our second meetup in November 2025.
Expanding your picture of what’s happening
One thing I noticed after changing teams several times is how easy it is to develop a very narrow view of the company.
Sprint reviews are mostly about product increments. There’s no time to talk about new technical practices, architectural decisions, or how a team changed the way it works.
You can spend years in your slice of the codebase without understanding what’s going on around you. Meanwhile, colleagues are solving interesting problems and building things that could be useful to you too. Without a place where people share that, it just never comes up. Meetups became that place for us.
One of the meetup’s real wins
We had our own routing mechanism for a long time, then migrated to React Router, but URL management still wasn’t particularly pleasant. One engineer, as part of their PDP, implemented an abstraction layer for unified URL handling with fully typed parameters.
A meetup gave him a stage. Other engineers started experimenting with it. Today, every frontend engineer uses that solution. Without the meetup, that work would have stayed inside a single team. That’s probably one of my favorite examples of what these events can do.
I’ve switched teams several times and worked in very different parts of the product, and I still learn something new every time. That’s probably the most personally valuable thing I get as a community organizer.
Here’s what attendance looked like at our latest meetup in April 2026.
Ok, I’m in, where do you start?
After five meetups, I don’t think there’s a magic formula. But there are a few things that will help you to begin from square one:
1. Go to other people’s meetups first.
Before organizing anything, become part of someone else’s community. Watch how they run events, talk to organizers, ask what broke. Starting from scratch sounds exciting but it’s also an efficient way to collect every avoidable mistake yourself.
2. Start smaller.
It’s tempting to announce a company-wide engineering meetup from day one. Don’t.
Start with a group where you already have relationships — mobile, backend, frontend. Start with your own unit. The first two meetups naturally gravitated toward frontend topics. That’s where I knew the most people and where finding speakers was easiest.
3. Find people who care about the same thing.
This is the most important one. Communities don’t die because of a lack of ideas. They die because one person gets tired. If the entire community depends on one organizer, it already has an expiration date. Find people who care about the same thing and build a core group. They will keep things going when you’re too overwhelmed with work tasks or just out of energy.
4. Learn how to motivate people.
For this you should know what the speaker gets out of it. Sometimes it’s visibility and recognition. Sometimes it is a practice of public speaking. Or just a chance to spend time with interesting colleagues and free pizza.
The same applies to attendees. A meetup without an audience is every organizer’s nightmare. Trust me.
5. Get support before you start.
Meetups happen during work hours, so does the preparation for them. Most managers support such kinds of activities. Some won’t. Get explicit support from your manager or leadership before investing months into building something.
And if your company has people responsible for employer branding or DevRel, talk to them early. In reality, these teams are often looking for exactly this kind of initiative. They can help promote events through internal communication channels, attract more attendees, and generally make sure your meetup doesn’t depend entirely on word of mouth. More importantly, they could help with motivation including something more tangible than recognition: for example points that can be exchanged for company merch, small rewards, or other perks.
6. Don’t do everything yourself.
If you’re speaking, ask someone else to host. If you’re organizing, let someone else own parts of the process. Communities become more sustainable when responsibility is shared. And you’ll enjoy them more too. Because at some point you stop running an event and start being part of a community.
Want to be part of our engineering community? Take a look at our open positions. Maybe we’re looking for you.
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