Meteor Paris S03E03

The last Meteor meetup took place at Algolia, and I helped organize it. I never coded in Meteor (yet), but I follow the technology from a distance, and hosting the event was a really interesting experience.

I was actually quite surprised by the way the meetup is organized. There is no defined agenda. People just raise their hands when they want to talk about something. Some have slides, some don't. And once everyone has talked, you can suggest subjects for open-table discussions for the remaining of the meetup. After that it's a pizza buffet and networking time.

Fastosphere

The first talk was from Vianney and François, the organizers. They were not happy with the official repository of Meteor packages, called Atmosphere, and decided to code their own, called Fastosphere. They scrapped the data from Atmosphere and pushed it to Algolia, in order to provide a faster and more relevant search.

They both love what we do at Algolia, so we did not even had to do a speech about us, they did it for us, and much better than what we could have done. They showed a bit of code on how to push data to Algolia, and then how to search it. They showed the dashboard, and the various analytics metrics you can get from it.

Vianney even said "Algolia is too fast, we had to query their servers directly because if we had gone through our Meteor server, this would have been way too slow".

Other talks

Then other people suggested talks. We talked about Slack bots done in Meteor, to order from PopChef (french food delivery startup), or to order a Uber cab. A guy also showed a really nice looking website where you can upload your holiday videos and it will build a 2mn short video of the best parts.

Open tables

After that, two open tables were created to talk about Docker and testing. I went to the one about testing and it seems that testing (end-to-end as well as unit) is not something a lot of people do in the Meteor world. There are no clear and easy way to test stuff, which in my opinion does not smell very good. I did not attend the Docker open-table, but there seem to be a nice git repo with all the needed information.

Conclusion

I'm still impressed by the way this meetup is auto-organized and how it works well. Even without knowing anything about Meteor, I had a really great time and nice talks with the attendees.

Tags : #meteor

Want to add something ? Feel free to get in touch on Twitter : @pixelastic