Hack Night #1: 2 17 2015

Present: Andrea, Austin, Tim, Ziggy

We started out discussing a possible collaboration on a TLC website, potentially as a useful hack night project. We want to keep the discussion loose until Pea arrives, though, as she offered the initial concept and a working blueprint on the TLC list.

Some interest in using Node.js, since it dovetails with a lot of folks' skills and current learning. Andrea is tentatively reluctant to endorse rolling our own CMS, since the CMS concept introduces a lot of overhead. ("If it's just information about the group, and a collection of blog posts," we could have, say, Markdown files rather than databases.

Austin notes that we are all trying to learn a bit about project management and Agile; "I think it would be nice to go through the steps like, start with the bare minimum we need, how does it feel, oh we need this, oh we need this, let's pull this in (I'm sure someone already made it), etc"

Tim notes that it would be nice to keep some of hack night open for the projects we've been working on and talking about on Sunday, if we can, rather than working solely on this shared project (that Tim totally thinks is rad). Like maybe half and half. But flexible, maybe not every week, people should be able to opt in and out, Austin suggests. Asks Andrea if she'd be willing to help teach us to design the project together. She would be happy to.

Andrea: "One thing that goes through my mind when thinking about how this project might end up coming out is, it would be worthwhile to ask ourselves -- ask each person individually -- what is your true interest in working on and collaborating on this project ,and assessing -- is this a long term project? Is it just something we spin up some time working on, and there is maintenance but otherwise not doing a lot on over time, or is it something someone wants to spearhead and be in charge of and elicit help from other people to ensure it... I think that kind of frames the direction of where things go. And I think it depends a lot on who's interested and how enthusiastic they are -- when I've worked on collaborative web sites in the past, there's less collaboration and mostly just wanting to get it done and not worry about it. So my instinct is to kind of temper it a little bit, so it's not a big project. And so maybe there's insight into -- if we did use Hack Nights for some number of weeks, or a couple of months, half the time -- there'd be sort of an expectation that we'd bring it to completion, even though it would require some maintenance."

Austin: "Guillaume often talks to me about -- have we talked about open house? I think he keeps meaning to ahve it on the agenda but we never talk about. Tehre's this idea, that I think is good, if there's a certain point, some number of months out -- treat this current period as a semester -- have a thing where we show things off."

Ziggy: "Your chat must be part of the website, obviously."

Austin: "That would be a nice target to work toawrds -- our personal projects to share, and then we have this one group thing. And this is actually really good for me, because we can't just dawdle forever."

Andrea asks if we want to pick a deadline.

Austin: "Yeah! Gosh. It depends on when we have space..."

Andrea means on the website.

Ziggy: "I always assume things don't take long, so... a week." Lulz. Andrea: "I was gonna say 8 weeks." Maybe 4?

Austin also thinks we're not sure how long it'll take right now. Andrea: "We could break it down, too -- in 4 weeks we'll have x; in 8 we'll have y. And somewhere in there we can reassess." Likes a shorter deadline, to reasonably keep things in scope.

Austin agrees. "In a week, we could probably have users for sure. And..." lol. "OK so, anybody can make a post. So we have a rudiment of post... with text field and title -- and anyone can do that." Should be doable in one week. But for anyone who's enver done Express before it might be a bit more.

Some chatter about speed, time, flat circles, etc