Coder Society Seattle, Inaugural Report!

Coder Society Seattle got off to a start this weekend on this beautiful sunny Saturday! We all mozied into the Blue Box offices in downtown Seattle a mere block away from Pike Place Market.
After a relaxed gathering we circled up to break out the kanban with the story ideas around our problem domain. We knocked this out in short order, all ready to dive into groups, frameworks, and determine what we’d learn for the day.

We all then took a democratic vote on which tech stacks we’d all work with for the day. We came concluded the vote with Sinatra and Node.js as our primary two framework stacks.

During this voting however we broached the topic of doing Backbone.js and Knockout.js. So we decided that, instead of two, we would break into three groups. This created two server side web services teams and a more pure client side team. Each team would act as if they were an independent startup, working specifically to provide a web data service API or respectively a UI that offered a mash up of this data.

Using Sinatra for the Barista Business Data Domain

@ang3lfir3
@trevorbramble
@strabd
@ang3lsdream
@adron
@monkeynumberone

Backbone.js & Knockout.js for the Bash Up of Barista + Coffee Drinker Business Domain

@sechrest
@volturiussystem
@iamjoncortez
@ph477y

Using Node.js for the Coffee Drinkers Business Domain

@scottkfraley
@jayzeng
@anupamonu
@iC
@pOch1

(NOTE: Some members didn’t have twitters yet, I’ll add em’ when they send em’.)

After the breakout we all dove into getting our various domains done. Many of us were not versed well with our respective technology stack we chose. Some time was consumed digging into that. After a few hours everyone had gotten a few solid key features done. In addition we’d all broken out our direct business objects into a set of models, interfaces, etc.

Mid-day we used the “Put your order on a post it note” ordering system and I (@adron) headed off to retrieve a true Chipotle Lunch. While there I experienced the odd queueing mismanagement that can happen since I had multiple orders and an unclear way to provide the messaging needed to get those orders into the “queue”. However, I succeeded finally and we all enjoyed lunch, courtesy of Tier 3! Thanks Tier 3!

We came toward the end of the day having learned a lot, built various aspects of what we had intended and all joined back up in the common space for a review of the day. There were a number of lessons learned that’ll will be integrated into the Coder Society flow. It was unanimously voted to be a successful day by the group. We did a short review of things to do slightly different and came up with these conclusions:

• Send links to git and github tutorials for those that aren’t familiar with this source control technology.
• Determine frameworks and specifics to configuring machines ahead of time.
• For web application development, PaaS by far saves hours of configuration and setup. Keep doing this in the future. However for certain “topics” we broach we’ll still use IaaS or other systems as needed.
• Minimize user stories to 3-4 specific stories per team. Have more flexible kanban boards that can be moved around or taken (re: like a poster board) to the area teams break out to.

With that, the inaugural meetups in Seattle and Portland are complete. I’m aiming for one more in San Francisco and then working to organize regular monthly meetings for the Coder Society. I hope you’ll join us in the future. If you’re interested in kicking off a Coder Society user group in your city feel free to ping me @adron on Twitter and we’ll coordinate.  Cheers!