Life of Dev4good 2012 - part 1
I have to admit there are a few grey spots from the dev4good weekend,
I think the lack of sleep and overdoses of caffeine, taurine and sugar are
probably the reason or a middle aged brain or a bit of both, anyway here is my dev4good,
deconstructed.
I sometimes hang awake at night dreaming of...
On the 7th of July at 8am I wandered up from
Charing Cross station to 101 St Martins Lane (mozSpace London) to begin dev4good
2012. As ever when I run events I like to get there really early, more out of a
weird recurring dream that I sleep in and missed my own event, than anything
else.
I am always apprehensive about how many people actually turn up, I had 57
registered but with 4 other hack events within a 20 mile radius it was a busy
weekend for developers.
I had everything organised, from badges indicating the
skills of the wearer (developer, designer, other) to chilled beer and energy
drinks.
But what had I forgotten?
This when the fear (F**k Everything And Run)
kicks in, the nervous energy and adrenalin start pumping….
Thankfully people started to arrive, massive relief and more
adrenalin (wuick flash back to Waynes World - if you book them they will come). John from Mozilla let us in and
the fun began.
The early starters were given jobs while I headed to Tesco to pick up
breakfast. All I had to pick up was 80 pastries to go with the Lavazza coffee we had been given. However the staff at Tesco had an issue with this and kept asking me how I was
going to carry 80 pastries, “in a bag” I kept saying but they still couldn’t
comprehend the purchase.
Anyway after much packing of pastries I got back to mozSpace
to find a few more people getting ready to go drinking the freshly brewed
coffee. Still not the 50 or so people I was expecting, but by this stage I had
forgot the numbers problem, we had enough for 1 solid team and that’s all you
need for a good hack.
We waited for a bit longer than I had wanted to, but
everyone was happily chatting and meeting the other geeks, just on 30 people had turned up - stoked!
Welease the dewelopers
After Intros from me, the Givey Team (Dave and Nick), Mozilla
(John) and Iyas who runs Hope and Play, plus a quick cameo from the naked guy out of friends at the window across the
courtyard kicked the weekend off.
As you will see only one charity had a representative, this might be down to me
not communicating the importance of this as well as I should (note to try harder next year) and to be honest
it was something I was initially concerned about. This worry was quickly dispelled while listening to Iyas talk about his recent trip to Gaza, how bad it really is on the ground and what we could to do help.
I remembered that we are
working on problems ‘seeded’ by charities and the more input the charities have
in front of the teams the bigger the chance our projects will come to solving
the ‘real’ problems, more on this later.
I have to admit some of things I used in my opening speech
may have had a bigger impact on the weekend than I had anticipated (in a good a
way I hope).
Things that come to mind “if you are in a team and are not
doing anything constructive, leave and join a team that needs you”, “last year
teams wasted a lot time on trying to make an existing platform do something
that it wasn’t designed to do, it might be quicker make it from scratch than to
rebuild existing code” or “use the skills you have already, focus on your
strengths and use them, learn where you can and teach where you can, but
remember time is limited”...
What have the Developers ever done for us?
The goal for each team was to produce and demo a mvp
(minimal viable product) in front of everyone else, sounds simple enough doesn’t
it?
Queue the mission impossible theme tune.
So project intros were complete and now the scariest part of
any hack event…. Will the people do anything when the gun goes off?
Another fear moment (probably a recurring dream about this too), everyone has heard the pitches and then decide to not take
part and leave. However I forgot I had a room full of some seriously smart and passionate people and after running around,
trying to find the man size post-it notes,
I came back to find the organic process of a group of individuals turning into
teams.
Popular people front - splitters
This is a process that if you haven’t seen is quite cool to watch, it’s hard to
explain but is a bit like the opposite of the Big Bang or like kids playing with play dough.
You start with a few people talking and others walking past overhear something
interesting and get pulled in, if the conversation isn’t what they want they
head off on a different trajectory. The bigger the group the more gravitational
pull they seem to have on others, then all of a sudden the group will disband
and people start to wander off again.
This continues until the groups stop disbanding and regrouping…. A very weird herd/pack
thing I guess.
This happened last year as well, so there must be an
anthropological reason for how/why this happens, whatever it is, it is very cool to watch.
The teams then headed off and started the first stint before
food arrived, time for me to put on the “client” or “devil’s advocate” hat on.
For the next couple of hours I bounced in and out of projects when asked to (or
not) listen to their ideas, pitches and try and help them to keep their ideas
within the rough specs we have. I think I was helping out but it is hard to
tell this early on in the day, I am sure I pissed a few people off. My goal of
the weekend was to make sure everyone built something that worked end-to-end, I
think people enjoy to complete something and show it off.
Otters noses, badgers spleens
Food arrived at 12 on the dot, there was enough food to feed
a small army. The herds snuck out from
the safety of their territories (air conditioned in some cases) to eat at the
watering hole then moved back to continue working. There was a serious buzz
around the place and nearly everyone seemed to be locked in to whatever they
had been tasked with.
More splitters, the developers front of tower.js
This is where the fun began, there had been much talk about
platforms, frameworks etc, with some very strong ideas about which is best for
this and that. One of the teams had already split in 2 by this time, so we had
Gaza1 and Gaza2, this was down to platform/framework choice I think.
I have to admit there had been murmurings from some, those mumbles of wrong
framework, bad ideas etc and a few people had moved out of teams to help elsewhere.
Something I really liked (it took some balls to drop out of a team) and not something
people can do at their day job - “Sorry boss I don’t like the database
structure we are using and I am going to head off and work in the canteen this
afternoon, ok, thanks, bye”
One of the best quotes of the weekend has to have come from one of these
particular incidents - “They all went for a cigarette, but never came back”.
The aliens/ufo scene
Between lunch and dinner there is a large grey spot in my memory, I do remember bouncing in and out of scrum meetings, making fresh pots
of coffee, but not much a lot of detail. There seemed to be a lot of work going on and a lot
of people sitting at their laptops with headphones on, just getting on with it.
Solidarity brothers, solidarity
Pizza arrived and this is where the teams had their first
proper long break of the day, everyone came together for a some chill out time before heading back to the keyboards - dedication!
It was about this stage that I realised what I had asked everyone to do, last year the goal was to have a good weekend hacking and have some fun. This year they had to build something that worked, then show it off and as any developer knows #failure is not an option when it comes to a live demo (Win95 and a USB device anyone).
I also had a chance to check out the project whiteboards and reflect on what had been planned by each team, they all had pretty big ideas and were way above what I thought was possible (proof of the skills and knowledge of the teams taking part).
I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen?
There was a lot of coffee, monster energy drank over the next 12 hours, plus a tiny piece of sleep and in the early hours of Sunday morning, something close to a geek revelation took place for 2 developers (and me).
Crucifixion party, one cross each, by the left, wait for it...
big thanks to
