Thursday Night Hacks

[kdmcclin]

I was talking with a few folks at the hackathon this past weekend and floated the idea of doing occasional hack nights separate from any individual language lab. I've heard attendees mention wanting more hack nights, and while this doesn't obviate the need for language labs to have an occasional hack night (particularly labs with regular attendees), this might help us retain members of the WWCDC community. I'm thinking in particular about those who don't feel like they're enough of a beginner to attend some tech talks/git talks/first timer's nights, though people of all levels could benefit.

Doing this on an occasional Thursday makes sense to not clash with language labs. The biggest question that's come out of the initial discussion is whether to have a more general hack night or a specific one (like a mobile hack night for iOS, Android, mobile web, others). The pros and cons that I can remember having come up are:

General Hack Night

pros:

• isn't restricted to one type of technology so people feel welcome to work on whatever

cons:

• people might feel isolated if they're the only one there working on ___

  Specific Hack Night

pros:

• people might feel more energized to work on their personal projects if they know everyone else has similar goals for their project
• more likely to be able to bounce ideas off of someone if they're working on a similar technology

cons:

• attendees might feel like this is more of a "free advice on _____ technology" night and treat more experienced dev attendees as Stack Overflow incarnate

[mkmckenzie]

I like this! It would be good to do maybe once a month and try to have one lead from each language lab to encourage more interaction among leads too. I <3 my ruby friends but I would like to hang out with other WWC people too! This might also be a good venue for things like intro to git, or in-depth git talks, maybe reviews of different front-end frameworks that everyone can benefit from - but lightning-talk style so we still have time to hack. 😸

[mkmckenzie]

but wait can it be general lab night and more importantly can we have a dog in a little general's outfit (<< this is the more important comment)

[kdmcclin]

My inclination, though it's certainly just one voice in this, is to keep it separate as a hack night from any tech talks. My concern with trying to combine git talks (for example) with this hack night would be that it would end up being not fully either. Thursdays are our night for general tech talks and other things that don't fit into (or overflow) the context of the language labs and could still be used for that kind of thing.