#SF SAFE Pod Meetup #4 Review
Was very refreshing to have another SF Outreach event after all these years!
We had 17 people show up in total, about half as large as our events used to be, but we learned a ton from putting it on. The location was great and we thank everyone at Mozilla for hosting us, however we might see if a location more central and accessible to downtown will yeild a higher turnout in the future.
The Q&A showed us that @hunterlester and I have very complimentary knowledge about SAFE. He was able to cater to the Rust questions from Mozilla employees, and talk at length about his experiences compiling it (client_libs) on Pi’s & laptops, and things of that nature, while I was able to respond at length about many of the general questions people had about the technology, vision, economics, implications, & things of that nature, having read every topic that has ever came out on this forum since the beginning 
We also get along brilliantly, so I think we’re a great team!
Overall, @hunterlester and I agreed to have it be somewhat open-format, so we mostly were there to gauge the audience’s skill level, provide answers in discussions (like “when is Alpha 2 coming out??” ), and ended up in him showcasing his JS App Dev learning suite and me demoing TEST 17 sites and various apps, including some from my repos.
Many people were intrigued with how well video, audio, and websites were working on this small, decentralized network. And while nobody mentioned any specific apps they are planning to build, several asked for the Mock-Routing pack link, so I gave it to them and demo-ed usage of it (Authenticator Mock-Routing pack repo). So we may see programs coming from them in the future!
We had many people that @piluso kindly brought from “42 College.” an online / campus based next-gen programming university, who had many deeply probing questions about the system and led to many insightful discussions.
Many people were asking for a recording, so I tried from my Ubuntu laptop but it crashed when I was presenting and I wasn’t able to check on it and see until after everything was pretty much finished. I think we might need some sort of cheap simple tripod camera after a while, since @hunterlester plans to do events monthly, and I plan to even more frequently. I apologize for that!
Overall it was a great ice-breaker back into the SF scene, and we learned very much by hosting the event. In terms of food, pizza / soda are always a winning combination of the perfect “dev food,” and everyone took very well to the stickers, shirts, camera tags and everything we handed out. Next event I will give out the USBs from MaidSafe Asia.
We think it will be great to have more of a formal lesson plan next time, because people said they like to come to events and listen for a while, with the more informal Q&A afterwards. So we will definitely have a lecture / lesson planned for the next event. We also might have our next event at their “42” programming university campus in Fremont, TBT. They seemed very interested and welcoming.
So we thank everyone (@maidsafe) who made this event possible, and it will only get better from here!
