On a Wednesday evening under a clear sky and with a view of the skyline of the city, the first DEV in real-life meetup happened! Regular DEV contributors, community members, and people curious about DEV came out to meet each other, hear lightning talks on a diverse array of topics, and share in good food and drinks.

The meetup was held on the balcony of the Vonage R&D Center in the heart of the city. Our hosts provided a delicious assortment of delicacies for all to enjoy along with the amazing views from the balcony.

I opened the lightning talks with an introduction to building apps using webhooks. I discussed why webhooks were useful when interacting with external APIs, and shared an example of Rails Nexmo voice application that took caller's input on the phone call and used it to control the flow of the application.

The second lightning talk was offered by Clara on the setup, skills, and practices that are helpful when mentoring junior developers. She shared real experience from her work as an instructor at a coding bootcamp.

[Deleted User]

After a short break to enjoy more of the food and each other's company, we entered our final round of lightning talks starting with Jonathan on getting started with Gatsby in 10 minutes. He shared with the community the benefits of using tools like Gatsby and walked everyone through a live example from start to finish, including cross-posting on DEV itself!

Jonathan PFollow

Fullstack developer, working with various stacks. I love to make products from start to finish. I love making cross-platform apps using web tech.

Lastly, but certainly not least, Avital closed the evening with the final lightning talk where she introduced everyone to Lucy, the bot that makes your API docs. Avital emphasized how important API documentation is for product adoption. She shared different standards for API docs, like Open API Specifications. Lucy is a tool that automates the process of documentation creation, and Avital gave a walkthrough on how to use it, and how her company Kaltura uses it.

Avital TzubeliFollow

I love bringing ideas to life, which means I generally have too many hobbies... but it also oftentimes leads to some really great things!! I'm Backend Developer turned DevRel, living in magical TLV.

It was a great start to a new community of devs who enjoy the DEV online community to meet, greet and learn from each other within the Israeli developer landscape. A big thank you to Vonage for being the hosts for our first meetup. The hospitality was legendary, and I am not just saying that because they are my employer!

We look forward to bringing this meetup around Tel Aviv and experiencing the full diversity of spaces within the city. If you are interested in hosting a future DEV TLV meetup please get in touch with myself or with Avital.

Yalla, on to the next one!