tl;dr Andy Allan's history of the Scotch on the Rocks conference that he started in 2004 as an Adobe ColdFusion meetup and ended in 2014 when it became a generic web conference. He definitely doesn't pull any punches with himself, revealing that he was drunk in that first conference from partying at a soccer viewing the night before.

There is definitely a thin line to walk with the size of in person meet ups. The developer meet up that I attend, which sees maybe ten or so regulars, definitely feels like it could expire from lack of interest. But, a poetry meet up that my spouse organizes, with thirty or so regulars, sometimes suffers from attracting outsize personalities that threaten to break off. My spouse maintains that her job is not to grow, but to provide space, and kept to that even during the 2020s pandemic.