Wechaty Contributor Beijing Meetup 2021/04

Wechaty Contributor Beijing Dinner

During the Qingming Festival, we organized a small-scale offline gathering of Wechaty Contributors. To be honest, it was quite sudden because there were no advance reservations. I impulsively asked everyone if they were available, as we hadn’t met the community leaders face-to-face since PadLocal was released. The fate was that, possibly because of the holiday, everyone happened to have time, so the gathering came together.

At 10 AM, a group of people gradually arrived at Beijing’s “Youthful Lower Leg” CAFE as agreed. According to Gaoyuan, this is Huan’s base, and he’s particularly familiar with the owner - just ask him directly for anything good to drink.

After sitting down and exchanging pleasantries, gradually becoming familiar, we began today’s topics:

1. I first talked about the origin of PadLocal. We also started slowly because of our own business needs. The more we worked on it, the more we found the technology particularly interesting. At the same time, we could appreciate the thinking of the WeChat team. Late at night, I often had a feeling of remote dialogue, which was simply a soul-deep communication. Initially, we hesitated whether to release PadLocal externally, and found that Wechaty is a particularly meaningful community. If we can help everyone with RPA, it’s worth it. This is also the original intention of our team.
2. Being able to talk with so many veteran members of the Wechaty community, of course we couldn’t miss this excellent opportunity. We talked a lot about the community’s history, some interesting tidbits, and those interesting members. As a newcomer, I gained a deeper understanding of this loving community.
3. Everyone also talked a lot about the WeChat ecosystem, especially the Enterprise WeChat that JuziBot is currently working on. Enterprise WeChat may be one of the most exciting products in recent years. Being able to cultivate deeply on this platform is definitely a meaningful thing, and I wish JuziBot all the best.
4. As the founder of Wechaty, Huan has recently been doing a lot of work on community building, such as how to make Wechaty’s documentation better. He recommended The documentation system, which is divided into “TUTORIALS”, “HOW TO”, “EXPLANATION”, and “REFERENCE”. With this logic, documentation writing can be smoother, and readers can consult it more conveniently. When this blog goes online, everyone can check out Wechaty’s official website - the effect is quite impressive. BTW, some people in the community complained before, “this is not good, that is not satisfactory” (of course, no criticism intended). But rather than complaining, why not participate? Only in this way can we make the community better. Moreover, the Wechaty that everyone can use now: “The World’s Shortest ChatBot Code: 6 lines of JavaScript/Java/Python/Go…”, is the result of the hard work of many people like Huan. This was also one of my biggest takeaways from this gathering.

We chatted for a whole morning, feeling like we met too late and enjoyed the conversation immensely. This is a group of idealistic people doing idealistic things. If not for hunger, we wouldn’t know when we’d be willing to get up.

Finally, Huan asked me a question: “How do you feel about Wechaty using English as the main language of the community?” I looked at him with a smile and replied in a very authentic old London accent: “We are totally fine with it”.

Here’s also a preview: after we finish some things at hand, PadLocal will organize a Workshop to talk about WeChat. The time was originally said to be the end of April, but now it looks like it will be postponed, tentatively scheduled for May. The theme will be kept secret for now, but it should be quite interesting for community members - you definitely don’t want to miss it.

Attendee introductions:

@huan, Huan LI, Tencent TVP of Chatbot, <zixia@zixia.net>

@lijiarui: Full stack developer, serial entrepreneur, Founder & CEO of JuziBot

@gaoyuan: Founder & CTO of JuziBot

@padlocal: Wechaty Padlocal puppet

Chinese version of this post: wechaty contributor meetup