Ribeirão Preto is a big city, but an inland one. And inland, in tech, almost always means the same thing. You learn on your own, you work a bit isolated, and the good communities are all in São Paulo, about four hours away by car. In 2022, some friends and I decided it didn’t have to be that way, and we founded RP.js, the JavaScript community of Ribeirão Preto.
The idea was simple and stubborn. A monthly, in-person, free meetup, open to every stack, with a clear focus on people who are just starting. Students, junior devs, people switching careers. The ones who most need a place to show up, ask questions, and meet the others in town doing the same thing.
How it worked
The format was always similar. One or two talks, plus a showcase from a student or a community project. The first event was at Dabi Business Park, with Amir Elemam on threads in Node.js, Luiz Froes, CTO at Complette, on the challenges of breaking into the market, and Pedro Brilhadori on consuming APIs in JavaScript. An outside professional and someone from the house on the same stage, on purpose.
I don’t have the numbers saved. We always ran everything over WhatsApp and Discord, with no pretty metrics. But what I remember is that it always filled up. A free tech meetup, in an inland city, packed with people who wanted to be there. To me, that was already the result.
The team
RP.js isn’t mine. I co-founded it with José Guilherme, and from the start there’s been a team of organizers and coordinators who make it happen, Pedro, Alexandre, Italo, Patricia. It’s volunteer work, done in the free time of people who already have a job and college. My side of it was always more the technical one, taking care of the site, the tools, the Discord bot, and helping organize.
Where I want to take it
Today I have a bigger plan for RP.js, and it’s the part that excites me most. We always managed everything by hand, over WhatsApp, with no history and no visibility. I want to turn that into a real open-source platform, not just for RP.js, but for any tech community in Brazil to run its own. Event management, sign-ups with capacity control, QR-code check-in, attendance certificates that count as academic hours, and a promo card auto-generated for Instagram and LinkedIn.
And there’s a second intention in that plan. I want to build this platform as a real learning project, with junior devs from the community working on production code, mentored by me. On the stack I like, Astro on the front, NestJS and Postgres on the back, on the same low-cost self-hosted infra I already run for other projects. It’s closing the loop. The community that gave me a stage when I was starting out becoming the place where others start.
Why it matters
It’s easy to look at an inland meetup and think it’s small. But community is the only thing that solves the isolation of learning on your own, far from the big centers. For a lot of people here, RP.js was the first place where you could get up on a stage, ask a silly question without fear, or simply find out you weren’t alone. Helping build that, and wanting to build more, is one of the things I’m proudest of outside of code.