Saying Goodbye to Triangle Cocoa
Organizing Triangle Cocoa—CocoaHeads and NSCoder Nights—changed my life. My career was mostly focused on .NET programming for AutoCAD and I dabbled with Mac programming on the side. When the iPhone SDK was released I fell in love with it. I started learning as soon as it was possible—I went from dabbling to “taking it seriously”. There was a lot struggle in learning alone, none of my coworkers knew anything about Apple platforms and there wasn’t as much content out there as there is today.
Eleven years later–my career has changed, I’m a better engineer, and I’ve found a network of friends and mentors. Not to mention I’ve been a speaker at several conferences and even other meetups. After all this time, I’ve decided to move on as the organizer and find someone else to guide the group’s future.
Early on the struggle to understand Cocoa Touch with a few hours on nights and weekends was a challenge. I started listening to other developers in the industry via podcasting, twitter, and other local meetups. After attending NSConf in Atlanta in early 2010, I was convinced I wanted to start a CocoaHeads chapter (so we could talk about Mac dev too!). Throughout 2010 I tried several times to get it moving and had little success. Adding it to meetup.com in early 2011 helped it really start to grow.
Over the years we’ve had so many great meetings—check out the historical repo that lists all the CocoaHeads meetings and their talks. We’ve also had an NSCoder Night going for most of this time too. Over 800 members and 726 events in 10 years! In this time we’ve had meetings with as many as 60 people, a talk from the founder of CocoaHeads, and once as a group were able to outvote other, bigger, cities to draw CocoaConf to Raleigh.
So why stop? Early on information about Cocoa was not as wide-spread. I had such a great time at that conference I asked myself, “what if we had a conference every month?”. This “vision” of what CocoaHeads could be was a driving force in making sure there was content for beginners and advanced engineers. I really wanted to create a community that welcomed everyone. I think I succeeded. However, nowadays there is so much content out there online I’ve struggled with what my driving “vision” for the meetup would be. The answer has been, “I don’t know”. I had to ask myself a new question, “Should someone else take ownership of this meetup?”.
The answer to that question is “Yes”. I’ve done this for over 10 years and it’s time for someone else to find their vision—assuming someone will take it over. I emailed the group and heard nothing besides a lot of much appreciated “thank you"s from many of my friends. Then surprisingly at the 11th hour, someone decided to step up and take the meeting. I hope they can continue it and hope for the best.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to help organize the meetings, speak, help others, and everyone who just attended meetings. You all made this one of the best groups I’ve ever attended. You’ve also helped make this a great community that continues with or without the meetup.
Triangle Cocoa changed my life for the better. If you are considering organizing a meetup in your community I highly recommend it. You learn so much about how to be a leader, how to be a better contributor, and how to communicate with people. You also will make a lot of new friends.