Thread by @polotek

So this turned out pretty great in my opinion. I wanna do it again. Thanks to everyone who participated and those who showed up to listen. Thank you to my brilliant co-moderator @betsythemuffin.

Let me do a quick debrief.

https://twitter.com/polotek/status/1350917549798551553

First let me apologize again to those who expressed interest but were not able to get into Clubhouse. What I learned is that they have intentionally made it quite difficult to bring more people onto the platform. To be fair, it is a closed beta. But this was pretty disappointing.

I think at the maximum we probably had 30 or so people in the room. Not huge. I think it was good that the room stayed small enough that there was plenty of space for anyone who wanted to talk. I can imagine that not being true as the audience grows.

I think we did a decent job rotating people on and off the stage. We tried to keep it at 5 max, including the two moderators. People were gracious about stepping down from the stage, which helped a lot. But I did get the sense that some folks had more to say if they had stayed.

We spent a solid hour and 45 minutes engaged in direct discussion. We took a break in the middle for about 7 minutes. There was appetite for more discussion, but also some fatigue. Hard to find a balance. I’m glad I ended it when I did.

We’re we able to get at some deeper technical discussion? I think so. It takes a while to ramp up. We had to feel out where people were at. The first half we did a lot of context setting. What is redux? Are we all thinking of it similarly? The second half got much more practical.

The topic I chose, “was the redux pattern a mistake”, was intentionally provocative. I wanted to get at strong technical opinions rather than just sharing info. I think that happened, and I was happy with it. But we also navigated towards the nuance rather than staying simple.

To give an example, at one point I asked the room directly “how would you do this thing in redux?” We had some discussion about it, but there was no clear consensus. That was interesting to me because it validates my bias that we don’t spend enough time talking about this stuff.

I have some thoughts on how I might make tweaks next time. If folks who participated have thoughts on what you would want to see, please reach out and let me know. This was a good start.

I’m now connected to most of the folks who participated. Michelle, Kris, and John, if you’re here on Twitter please let me know so we can connect.