Check out the new Philly Tech Calendar for all your local meetup needs

A lot of the technologists we at Technical.ly talk to cite building “community” as a motivator for whatever they’re working on. The value of gathering with likeminded professionals has become even more apparent since the COVID-19 pandemic kept people apart.

Joe Woods, organizer of the Philly JavaScript Club (and a 2023 RealLIST Connectors honoree), recently launched a tool to help the Philly tech community stay in the know and gather more.

As a meetup organizer, Woods said, one of the biggest challenges is publicizing events well enough that anyone who might be interested in attending knows where and when it’s happening. He wanted to create another way for meetup groups to spread the word about their events.

Enter: Philly Tech Calendar. The tool lists upcoming events including the date, time, location and a link back to the original event posting. There’s also an option to subscribe to the calendar’s newsletter, or subscribe to its listings via your preferred calendar platform, such as Google Calendar.

Woods made the first version of the calendar back in April, and since then, he’s been tweaking it and adding features. It didn’t take a lot of work to set up, he said.

Joe Woods. (Courtesy photo)

“This is a Next.js app, but it’s a little atypical in that it’s actually just deployed on a DigitalOcean Droplet,” he said. “The back end has custom orchestration to connect it to a totally normal calendar, which I manage using Fastmail’s web interface. I also built some bespoke tooling to manage the mailing list part, which sends emails using Amazon’s SES.” (Woods’ day job is senior client application development lead at the email company with a Philly office.)

To keep the calendar as full and accurate as possible, he tries to keep up with various tech community groups in the city so he can amplify their events when they are posted. Anyone who wants to reach out to him about their event can find his contact information on the Philly Tech Calendar website, too.

Woods said the Philly tech community is full of people who are passionate about making connections and expanding tech education and access. Post-pandemic, he said it’s great to see people come back together in person.

“I am really glad that I was able to put together this thing,” he said. “It’s just one more avenue to help people out. It helps me as a meetup organizer, and I hope it helps other people as well.”