Dev Club Weekly

The First Helpathon.

We decided last week to try an experiment: come to Dev Club with a project (or some enthusiasm) and spend the 2 hours writing code. If you need help - there's a room full of nerds ready to jump in. If you want to chat - chat. If you don't - don't.

So Dev Club tonight was that. Which is to say: Dev Club tonight was pretty much like every other Dev Club EXCEPT that there's explicit permission from the start to check out of the conversation (if there is one) and code for a while (or the whole time if you want).

I really enjoyed it. Josh hacked on our share github page. I poked around on a tower-defense game I've been thinking about for a little while. Mostly we talked.

Topics of conversation included:

• French and Goblin and Lingua Esoterica
• The Great Leap Forward and tragedy of mixing politics and science
• Chaos Theory, Lorenz Attractors and Emergent Phenomena
• Mac vs Linux
• My dream of functional 2 way data binding in the browser
• Bootcamps and MOOC certificates
• The future of The Clubhouse and Augusta
• Women Who Code: Atlanta

Next Week: Meteor JS! 

See you then.

Dev Club Weekly

This week (our first Dev Club on Friday night) the conversation included:

• The awesome new clubhouse for the Clubhou.se
• Context-Free-Grammars
• HTML and CSS in email
• SQL (dear lord, the SQL)
• Foreign Keys
• Cascades
• Databases as code repositories
• Hackathons and Helpathons
• Women Who Code Atlanta

Next week, inspired by Women Who Code: Atlanta, we're going to try an experiment. Instead of a workshop or a hackathon, we're going to have a helpathon. Come with a project in mind, or a thing to add to the helpathon. These things could be any of the following:

• Enthusiasm
• Drawing ability
• Javascript skills
• Knowledge of Python
• A desire to learn about code
• CSS know-how
• Git experience
• Snacks
• Curiosity

you get the idea. There won't be any presentations.  There's no competition. You don't need to already know how to program. If you just want to come and sit in the same room with a few other tech people and poke around on your laptop while they talk about code, or poke on their own laptops - that's totally cool. Zero pressure.

I'll be there to help with Javascript or HTML or CSS or any of a few other technologies. Chad can help with even more than I can. If Fred can come - he's like the helper-in-chief. If you're comfortable helping others with their projects, and they request it - you can be a helpathon helper too.

So next week: an experiment in helping. Nerds Helping Nerds.