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kotlinlang

I am curious if anyone has any tips specifically about:
• Promoting the user group events
• Capturing the buzz around Kotlin, in a user group

I wrote a small blog post on the subject and I'm still developing my KUG

<https://dev.to/rossdrew/planning-and-inaugural-meeting-of-the-edinburgh-kotlin-user-group-3n04>

I'm curious as to what promotion you've been doing yourself <@UHVMPS9FB>.  We hover between 10-20, in a startup heavy city but you seem to have gotten 50 in your first go.

Hi <@USMCPJ2MV> - really sorry I only just saw this. I think one major factor is that a rather large organisation (SkyBet and Pokerstars) in Leeds uses Kotlin, and there's quite a lot of Kotlin devs for that reason. Most things that were Java are now Kotlin there (I also work there). I think maybe 50% of the devs were SkyBet or Pokerstars employees.

Other than that - I have also worked with a local recruitment company and helped them with an event called The JVM Thing, which we set up because leeds didnt have a Scala/Java/Kotlin user group, but we thought being polyglot was better... anyway - they have a lot of linkedin and twitter followers, and they were happy to sponsor and promote the event (although we dont share data with them)

Also Kotlin just seems to be getting bigger and bigger, and Leeds is a bit of a digital hub, we used to go to the West Yorkshire Kotlin user group around 2016/2017 - there was about 6 of us in a pub :slightly_smiling_face:

Oh we offer free food and drinks too - paid for by the event sponsors.

But essentially getting the word out on linked in, and twitter mostly. We made a website to point people at: <https://leedskotlinusergroup.netlify.com/>

Oh and getting in touch with Jetbrains for free swag, if you haven't already (T shirts, stickers etc)

We’re doing all of that and seem to be in mostly the same situation.  The big organisation helps though.
Thanks for the info. 

Ah good stuff. I think we'll tail off in numbers though, we may have got a few tourists wondering what Kotlin was about.