The Ethereum Engineering Group Meet-up is a group that meets via Zoom each two weeks. We have speakers from all over the world who deliver talks on Solidity, the Ethereum platform, cryptography, crosschain & bridges, applications, economics, law, social aspects of blockchain, and much more. All talks are recorded and appear on YouTube. Talks commonly have hundreds to thousands of views, with the most viewed talk currently having 50K views. Pick-up a cool T-shirt at the Merch Store.

History

The meetup was created to help foster Ethereum engineering talent in Brisbane, Australia. The focus was to have more people who could be hired into ConsenSys’s Protocol Engineering team (at the time called the PegaSys team). The team was creating Hyperledger Besu (originally called NewClient, and then Pantheon).

The first meetings to organise the logistics of the meetup occurred in late 2017, with the first talk taking place in early 2018. Early talks occurred at ThoughtWorks’ Brisbane office’s meeting space. This moved to various locations in WeWork in Brisbane, where ConsenSys had an office. The meetup moved online in March 2020 due to the COVID pandemic.

Moving to Zoom has provided great opportunities, allowing for speakers and audience members from all over the world. Having more control over the recording environment has also led to a dramatic improvement in the audio and video quality of the recordings on YouTube.

The original organisers of the meetup were Brett Henderson, Rob Dawson, and myself, Peter Robinson. Sandra Johnson, Joanne Fuller, David Hyland-Wood, and Raghavendra Ramesh have provided significant assistance over many years to make the meetup what it is today.

FAQ for Speakers

What topic areas are covered by the meetup?

Talks have been on a broad range of topics:

  • Ethereum protocol and Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs)
  • Layer 2 protocols, zero knowledge proofs, Optimistic and Validity Rollups
  • Crosschain protocols
  • Consensus protocols
  • Solidity development and tooling
  • Decentralised Finance (DeFi)
  • Oracles
  • Applications: Goveranance, Supply chains, Games, Security, Space
  • Hack and Vulnerabilities
  • AI
  • Standardisation
  • Formal Methods
  • Economics
  • IP Law
  • Cryptography
  • Regulations
  • Recruitment

Should I avoid marketing?

Please avoid marketing pitches. If your talk is about a specific product, then please describe the technology your product is based upon and how your product works. If you want to explain how your product relates to other products in the market, please be careful to ensure comparisons are fair and impartial.

Who are the audience?

There are 1752 members of the meetup.com group and 8120 subscribers to the YouTube channel. These people come from widely varying backgrounds: blockchain infrastructure developers, application developers, researchers, enthusiasts, venture capitalists, recruiters, and novices. The audience typically self-selects to attend talks or watch videos based on the title and their perception of the likely content. That said, speakers should assume that the audience will consist of many people conversant with blockchain technologies, and could well include world experts on their topic.

How long should my talk be?

Talks have been between 30 minutes and 90 minutes, including question time. A good target time is 60 minutes, including questions.

What format should my talk take?

Talks are typically slides, but can be demonstrations, Q&A, or a combination of these. Some talks have been 20 minutes of presentation and 40 minutes of questions. How you structure it is up to you.

When should I join the Zoom call?

You should join the call 15 minutes prior to the start of the talk. I will send you a meeting invitation that will start 15 minutes prior to the start of the talk: that is when you should join. Joining early gives us time to ensure your audio, video, network, sharing are working, and that your location doesn’t have too much background noise.

When you join 15 minutes before the call starts, you will often see other people join early. You might even join in the middle of an animated conversation. This is the just meetup attendees catching up and discussing the issues of the day.

When should I ask for questions?

When to take questions is up to the discretion of each speaker. I encourage each speaker to explain to the audience the strategy they wish to take at the start of their talk. I find the best approach is to present up to a section break, pause, ask for questions and go through questions in the chat. Then, at the end of the talk, do a final run through of any final questions. This approach has the advantage that people are more easily able to recall the context of the questions.

Note that some attendees’ mother tongue is not English. The attendees might feel more comfortable providing their questions via chat than speaking the question.

Will I present my slides myself?

Yes, you will present your slides.

Will my slides be published?

Yes. I ask you to put a PDF copy of your slides onto a Google Drive. I will make a copy of the slides, and then share in view-only mode that copy to anyone with the link. I will put the link into the description of the recording of the talk on YouTube.

What are LastSlides?

I have three slides that I ask that you put at the end of your talk. They contain a link to the Merch Store, details of future talks, and links to the meetup and YouTube sites.

Will my talk be published?

Yes. The recording of all talks are published on YouTube.

Yes. By presenting you are asserting that you own or you represent an organisation that owns the rights to the material that you present. If you are uncertain about who owns the intellectual property surrounding your talk, please talk to your team within your organisation to ensure people in your team are happy for you to give a public talk.

Referencing and fair use of copyrighted material

Talks will often include graphics or information of copyrighted material. Speakers must ensure the comply with Fair Use Provisions. Speakers should include a link to the original material on their slides.

Talks will often leverage earlier work. Please include references so that attendees can do further research.