2 days ago we held our first event, 12 Devs at Easter. What started off as my simple idea to get everyone who had written for the 12 Devs of Xmas down the pub for a few drinks and a chat, spiralled into 70+ people sat in Mozilla in central London, drinking beer, eating burritos and watching some amazing talks. The night was fantastic, Anthony and I really enjoyed ourselves and everyone who came has been so kind with their feedback and it’s made it all worthwhile.

As I said on the night, the 12 Devs of Xmas website started with a couple of tweets, Anthony’s tweeted something about getting people to write about web development around the xmas period similar to what 24 ways does with design. I foolishly replied saying “How about 12 Days of Dev, or 12 Devs of Xmas”, but I’m so glad I did! Just 6 weeks later the first 12 Devs at Xmas article went live and since then we’ve had 24 amazing articles over 2 years from 18 amazing authors (and two from me).

During and after our second year, me and Anthony started talking about what other stuff we’d like to do and we both liked the idea of events. Anthony started and still organises Croydon Creatives, a monthly meet up of creative folk around Croydon which he really enjoys and I’ve previously worked in events before I started my career as a web developer. We both attend a lot of web industry events and we love the community in this industry so holding an event for them would be fantastic. This is where 12 Devs stemmed from, the idea we could do more but keep it under a similar brand, we also liked the idea of doing things all year round so another series of articles and maybe more things like the Thoughts idea we’re going to be launching soon.

2 nights ago all the work we’ve put in so far this year came to a head with the 12 Devs at Easter event. We emailed past writers for 12 Devs of Xmas and asked them if they’d like to speak, we had a great response and so Jack Franklin, Linda Sandvik, Syd Lawrence, and Ruth John gave brilliant talks at our first event. There was also a brief talk from one of us too, Anthony stepped up to talk about how he works on so much stuff all the time, something I really needed to pay attention too. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, we sold out of tickets within 4 days of them being released which completely took us by surprise, we had a great turnout on the night as well nearly filling the space at Moz and feedback so far has been great. There’s still things we can improve on and we’re going to work on for next time.

Speaking of next time we’re just working on confirming a date and getting in touch with a venue and as soon as that’s set you’ll be the first to know.

So lastly I just want to say thank you to all who came on Thursday night, to everyone who offered a kind word of support on Twitter and everyone who has ever read a 12 Devs of Xmas article. It’s hard work but it’s something we both enjoy and the response we get from all of you guys makes it worth the effort.

We didn’t get the talks filmed this time round but people have uploaded their slides so we’ll get them added to the Lanyrd page soon. Also thanks to Richard Wiggins and Michael Heap for taking photos on the night, you can find them on Flickr (Richard’s photos and Michael’s photos) and if anyone did take any photos please do upload them to Flickr and tag them with #12devs they would be great to see.

If you came on Thursday night and wanted to leave us a bit of feedback it would be greatly appreciated, we set up a feedback form on Google docs or feel free to leave a comment on this article, it would be great to hear what you thought and what we can improve on for next time.