The Community Update features the latest news about Meetup exclusively from the Meetup team. This month, join Meetup’s VP of Engineering, Brian Guthrie for insights on Meetup’s technical direction with a new codebase and approach with our web presence, our mobile apps, and what’s to come.
Main Takeaways:
- Historical Engineering challenges at Meetup:
- Meetup has been coming to terms with friction in its codebase. Tests were difficult to load, it was often unclear which team was responsible for codebase and what the implications of a change might be, and there was an issue with the architecture itself (poor test coverage and patterns like singletons).
- What Meetup tried:
- We made 2 big bets to get out of the core system. First one was the new web front end. Second was a stab at integrating a streams architecture.
Unfortunately both of these required tweaking on the backend and that backend had the same issues that had plagued us before. It wasn’t yielding the results we needed as quickly.
- We made 2 big bets to get out of the core system. First one was the new web front end. Second was a stab at integrating a streams architecture.
- Timeline:
- We have laid the foundation of a new Meetup. We are working at the moment to improve event discovery and we’re now in the beta test process for the new experiences. If you want to get on the beta list, sign up here.
Coming up, we’ll be rolling out the beta to more organizers and groups, and we’re working to improve online events and communications tools.
- We have laid the foundation of a new Meetup. We are working at the moment to improve event discovery and we’re now in the beta test process for the new experiences. If you want to get on the beta list, sign up here.
Top Q&A Questions:
- Full re-write of full stack, how did you get your company leaders to buy-in to that?
- We were very fortunate in that everyone was on the same page that we needed to do something really significant in order to move the needle. Something needed to change for us to develop software more quickly.
- Should organizers have been more informed while Meetup went through these challenges?
- In the past, we weren’t in close touch with our organizers, and part of our goal is to do more of these live events and blog more frequently. I’m glad to hear that this event helped to give some context into the struggles that we were going through.
- Hiring? What’s the size of Meetup’s engineering team and are you remote?
- We are about 30 headcount with 10 or so contractors.
Both of our directors are fully remote. We work US Eastern hours, we recruit in states across the US and Canada as well.
You can learn more about our open positions here.
- We are about 30 headcount with 10 or so contractors.
Last modified on June 23, 2021
