Hack The Tower experience
High above the City of London, on the 27th floor of Tower 42, the salesforce.com office hosted Hack The Tower. I didn't really know what to expect but the day proved to be an amazing taste of the open-source experience: I had the chance to work with a team of eight great developers on codingboard.org, my little pet project for realtime code-sharing.
Agenda
10:00 am Introduction (I was late, but just arrived at the end, so I could announce CodingBoard as well)
11:00 am Went to a room together with other Scala users, there was another open source project: lsug.org for the London Scala User Group website. Both Andy and myself had a detailed introduction about our projects, so that people could decide on which they want to work on. Lucky enough the developers had a nice choice as we had different stacks to offer: lsug.org is Twitter Bootstrap, PlayFramework and MongoDB whilst codingboard.org is Twitter Bootstrap, Scalatra and no persistence.
~ 11:30 am Carlos, Dimitrij, Goncalo, Greg, Maria, Raul and Syed decided to hack on CodingBoard today :) and got started. We had a compilation error and some failing and flickering tests quickly fixed, installed the IntelliJ project generator SBT plugin, so just before lunch everything was ready for hacking. Greg already started implementing the syntax highlighted editing. We captured all ideas in Github issues, so we had a backlog of items to hack on. Prioritisation metric = FUN!
~ 13:00 the lunch was sandwiches, some salad and lots of crisps with coffee :) Thanks John!
We spent the afternoon working on different issues, we created by the end of the day 12 pull requests and had a release as well! Amazingly productive! I guess we were lucky with the project as it is still small, and easy to add small increments.
What I would do better next time:
- have a team level retrospective at the end of the day
- have a Group level retrospective as well, as although I walked around, it would have been nice to hear what other groups achieved in a summarised way
I am thankful for the London Scala User Group organisers (John Stevenson, Andy Hicks and saleforce.com) but even more for The CodingBoard Hackers: Carlos, Dimitrij, Goncalo, Greg, Maria, Raul and Syed. It was goooood fun!!!!
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