Collaborative design tools build the wireframe of Baltimore Tech Meetup

Community plays a crucial role in fostering growing ecosystems. In Baltimore, like many other cities, the connections that enable knowledge-sharing, business deals, hiring and more central parts of regional innovation grow through events that actually put people in a room together.

The Baltimore Tech Meetup is one of the most important threads in this tapestry.

Organized by Technical.ly RealLIST Engineer Cornelius Hairston, this group has hosted numerous events to engage and educate the local tech workforce since its revival in 2023. With over 1,600 members, the group connects people across East Baltimore through meetups designed to unite and educate the community. 

At a recent convening, the Baltimore Tech Meetup held an “Introduction to Figma” class led by Brady Starr, founder of Baltimore-based user experience/user interface (UX/UI) agency Brady UX. 

Figma, a highly popular collaborative design tool, has become a sought-after skill that employers frequently look for on jobseekers’ resumes. Its popularity is so widespread that Adobe attempted to acquire the company, though the deal was later abandoned. Figma’s collaborative and accessible nature allows even non-designers to integrate it into their workflow. This explains the nearly full house at Inner Harbor-based Spark Coworking, where over 20 attendees eagerly listened to Brady’s session. 

The curriculum was largely hands-on. Starr launched a Figma instance and invited each attendee to log in, allowing participants to see each other’s cursors and movements on-screen. Each attendee had their own space to work in as Starr walked them through Figma basics. During the session, he demonstrated some of Figma’s automation features, prompting one attendee to quip, “I wish I could get back all the time I spent centering text.”

The room was filled with a diverse mix of designers, students, professionals and entrepreneurs — all seeking to better understand Figma and its possibilities for their work. 

“How popular is Figma right now?” one attendee asked. “Will clients recognize work done in it?” 

Another shared how the meetup helped him gain the confidence to design a prototype for a media-related app he was building. Questions flowed freely, but the overarching sentiment was that Figma is an essential tool for many of their professional goals

Beyond its in-person events, Baltimore Tech Meetup also carries these exchanges into an active Slack community with around 2,907 members as of now. The group organizes semi-monthly IRL gatherings, while the Slack channel serves as a platform for various organizers to promote their events. The digital dimension fosters further collaboration and strengthens Baltimore’s emerging tech ecosystem.

If you’re interested in the next Baltimore Tech Meetup, be sure to join the group on Meetup.com.

This guest post mentions Spark Coworking, one of Technical.ly’s Preferred Partners. That relationship has no impact on this piece.