Over a couple of beers at Twisted Vine Brewery, Justin Stevens was showing off an unblinking, blue LED light on Thursday night. 

“I failed pretty miserably. … And actually, I don’t feel bad at all,” Stevens told the group gathered over three tables, a small variety of laptops and miscellaneous cords. “This is as far as we got, and the blue light works.” 

Thursday’s Webgeeks and Area 515 IoT awards show was less about the product and more about the process as a few dedicated web tinkerers showed off four projects, with various intents all finished at various stages. It was the first event organizers from both groups had worked on together, Stevens said, and it was solely for creation’s sake. (IoT stands for internet of things.) 

The monthlong project incorporated Area 515 members’ penchant for makerspace hobbies with Webgeeks members’ savvy for web programming. 

“We don’t always do things like tonight with hardware. This is kind of new for us,” Stevens said. 

“It was just a very natural thing to say, ‘Hey, you guys are tinkerers, and we are tinkerers, or like to think of ourselves as tinkerers. … Our audience and their audience certainly have that same geek-ability to find out as much as they can about a subject in a thing, and really deep-dive into it.” 

Des Moines Webgeeks recognizes 10 years in July of offering out-of-the-box experiences for coding and development enthusiasts. The group loosely started with a focus in web design, but grew with the Des Moines community into fostering more programming-heavy resources. 

For Thursday’s project, Stevens and his partners were aiming to build hardware that signals every time the lever of a beer tap is pulled — signals that, with a bit of math, could tell his team how much beer was left in the office keg. 

“Ideally, that would be the end result,” Stevens said. “We started that project with four other co-workers of mine. … I do have faith that the project will be taken to fruition, but probably not with me.” 

Stevens joined in 2009, one year after Webgeeks was founded, and now organizes metro eventsalong with Jessica Le and Josh Larson. 

“Webgeeks certainly is a really good group for entry-level people that don’t know where to put their efforts — they’re interested in this, but they don’t know how to take that anywhere else,” Stevens said. “Webgeeks is a perfect gateway for anybody who’s interested in developments in this world.” 

Webgeeks meets the second Monday of each month at Pillar Technology, and rotates among Des Moines sites for a lunch event regularly. The group has roughly 200 people involved in events, Stevens estimates, with an average of 20 people, depending on the event — most events tend to have a few new individuals attending, Stevens said. 

“We focus on trends in technologies rather than very specific aspects of web development,” he said. “There’s lots of other user groups that are very specific niche, and we’re just this wide — any part of web development is typically what we talk about.”