@NashvilleJUG reaches 100 members. Woot!

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

July 9, 2012

Back in April, I posted that the Nashville Java Users Group had reached 50 members. Today, we have no reached 100 members signing up on meetup.com/nashvillejug. This is incredible!

We are approaching our 2-year anniversary this October (despite what is listed on our meetup site), and it appears one of our founders, Csaba, will have departed Nashville by then. He has received an excellent opportunity in California and we wish him the best. We have had many others step up to assist in leading this group over the past year. We also have speakers booked through November.

These are all signs of a fantastic group. Members may come and go, but we are constantly growing. We average 30+ visitors at each meeting. It doesn’t cost anything to join this group and attend the meetings (something I have insisted on since the beginning). We have strong, technically oriented meetings so our members know that they are aren’t attending a sales pitch. We also see people working with enterprise Java, Android, Windows, Mac, & Linux, and alternative JVM languages like Groovy and Scala. All these things help let people know that the Java community in Nashville is strong and diverse.

When I first moved here in 2010, I wasn’t sure where the Java opportunities were. But now I am highly confident that there are many chances for people to work for good companies and develop with some very talented people. I hope that the others that show up for their monthly Java “fix” have the same sense of excitement as I do. Last week, I was chatting with a co-worker of mine who lives in Atlanta, plotting when he would be able to come up and speak at our JUG. This is truly what community is all about.

Having read some of ‘The Art of Community,” and understanding how valuable a community group is, I am proud to a member of such a valuable group. Here is to two wonderful years of Nashville JUG and eagerly looking forward to the next two. Hear hear!

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *