The Community Update features the latest news about Meetup exclusively from the Meetup team. This month, join Meetup’s new CTO, Rajib Ahmed, and VP, Engineering, Brian Guthrie for insights on what Meetup has planned for 2021 including moving to a new platform, building teams for success, and what’s to come.
Main Takeaways:
- New platform plans for the next year:
- Giving every old page a fresh look and feel
- Major performance improvements across every aspect of the platform
- Continuing to phase out our old notifications system and replace it with a shift to Braze
- Improvements to the app:
- Adding additional search filters (based on feedback from users, thank you!)
- Notifications, communications, and online events improvements
- We’ll also be evolving our events in many ways. Here are some examples:
- Making events more easily discoverable (You can learn more about the evolution of search at Meetup here)
- Increased personalization
- Exposure of events to search engines
- Internally, we created a new engineering team structure (small “pods”) to increase productivity, collaboration, and communication.
Top Q&A Questions:
- Why did you decide on AWS vs something else?
- Brian: We made a major shift into the cloud several years ago, as part of our cost optimization strategy.
- Rajib: It’s not that we can’t go to Google or somewhere else. We’ve just have done a lot of work here and where we want to focus is not shifting to a different cloud provider, but more on making sure we build the right products that effectively help our organizers are numbers as a focus.
- When can we add payments for events on the app?
- Rajib: We’re looking at that in the next few months.
- Brian: The new events experience has payments and ticketing integrated as a first class concern.
- What’s the time frame besides just 2021?
- Rajib: Our goal collectively, is to be able to put features out quickly. You can look at what’s happening on the product roadmap (past Meetup Live event here), which will then facilitate what’s also happening on the engineering side.
Last modified on November 30, 2023
