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title: "Regular Members"
weight: 10
---

Handmade meetups are monthly gatherings for programmers who enjoy digging into how computers actually work. We also welcome other tech workers, such as artists and cybersecurity professionals, to help us craft polished and secure software.

The community is famous for its obsession with performance and making things snappy or buttery smooth. As we enter our second decade, Handmade Cities has a vested interest in proper UI and UX (affectionately dubbed [UXUI](https://peter-slattery.github.io/handmade-prototyping/), pronounced ooks-wee.) 

Performance is rather useless if we ship another GIMP.


## Meetup Structure

How a local meetup is run depends on the [meetup host](/docs/meetups/hosts) in question. However, the overall structure goes like this:

1. The host sends a newsletter announcing the monthly meetup
2. You RSVP if you wish to attend
3. Meetup takes place at a coffee shop for a couple of hours
4. Folks demo their software projects
5. Optionally, group has round-table discussions on a hot programming topic

We then head out for dinner and drinks afterwards. What's important to remember is this is a basic template. Most of our meetups follow it, but hosts are allowed to deviate when it makes sense for the group.

Group size also varies depending on city. At the time of writing our biggest meetup ([Seattle](https://handmadecities.com/meetups/seattle)) exceeds thirty-plus any given month, while new ones ([Tokyo](https://handmadecities.com/meetups/tokyo)) hover at just a half dozen or so. Most cities fall somewhere in between.

## Meetup Newsletter

You can subscribe to a local newsletter by visiting [Meetups](https://handmadecities.com/meetups) and finding the city or region nearest to you. This way you'll receive meetup invites in the Inbox.

{{< alert context="primary" text="If you're unsure about the next meetup, message the host directly. Email address is on the city's meetup page." />}}

## Meetup Wishlist

Unfortunately we haven't taken over the world yet, so there's cities or countries we don't operate in. Please wishlist a "dormant" location by visiting [Meetups](https://handmadecities.com/meetups) and scrolling to the bottom of the page. 

We will reach out as soon as we've amassed enough subscribers and found a suitable host.
