The OpenHack Format

We have a little structure around our meetings to give people a chance to speak, bounce ideas off others, and “break the ice” for anyone who hasn’t met before. We are loosely adopting a structure that has worked well for other OpenHack meetups.

• 6:00 – 6:00 – Meet and Greet, Introductions – Please share who you are, and what you do.
• 6:15 – Hack!
• 9:00 – Doors close (or do they?)

We’ll begin with introductions around 6. Just say who you are, what you do and where you do it (if you want to), what languages/frameworks you work with, and anything else you want to share. This is just to let everybody get to know each other and see who does what so others can help/pair with them, or ask for help if you know something they don’t.

Next is the hack session. This is what OpenHack is all about – slingin’ code. That’s 2 and a half hours. You can pair up with somebody or work totally alone – it’s totally up to you. We encourage you to pair just for the fun of it, but nobody’s going to even -remotely- have a problem if you don’t.

You can hack on anything you want. Open source, closed source. Work. Play. Any skill level on anything on any project, it’s all good as long as you’re here to sling code.

Finally, we’ll wrap up with a segment that, for lack of a better term, we’ll call “bring it to the tribe”. The idea is that as a community of developers, engineers and computer scientists, we’re a “tribe” of sorts. So we need to help each other out. OpenHack – for us anyway – isn’t just about the code, but also about the people who write it! So we want to leverage the collective widsom of our “tribe” to help each other. This small wrap-up is designed to give people a chance to present a problem they may be having (code related) to the group.

Things like, “I can’t seem to grasp rspec’s DSL, can anybody recommend a good book or resource”, or “does anyone have any tips on how to convince my boss to let me re-implement this crufty old system written in outdated perl scripts as a REST-based SOA since it would be just so much cleaner?”. These topics (and more!) are what the tribe session is meant for, and we want to provide an open, official forum for members to ask each other for help in their present challenge. Maybe some one has experience, a book, or a contact who can help you out. This gives each of us a chance to leverage the group’s “tribal knowledge” to solve a problem.