A Meetup’s Iterative improvement
At the last Augusta Developer meetup I saw a community forming. Lucy Conklin’s talk on Netflix’s Chaos Monkey and the Simian Army instilled thoughts of Chaos Driven Development practices and huge gorillas with bazookas.
After the talk we organized break out sessions where people grouped up and talked about pre-determined topics such as JavaScript, Dev-Ops, and learning code. The groups presented some of the topics discussed. It was cool to see the range of experience and interests that attendees have.
For those attending these developer meet ups, I recommend this video, a talk by Uncle Bob Martin on the future of programming. He makes a myriad of amazing points and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning about the past, present, and future of programming. The point that stuck with me the most was that the number of programmers has been growing exponentially. The up side to this phenomenon a massive labor force is required to solve the challenges of a software based world. However, because of the rapid growth, the field becomes flooded with inexperience and teachers grow scarce. Finally, because teachers are scarce he says that means that new programmers are doomed to repeat mistakes due to lack of institutionalized guidance.
I feel even more excited about this group than ever before. It is so important to find teachers wherever we can, in order to prevent being doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before us. Even if we can’t find an experienced individual to show the way, it is important to be able to find friends to work with, bounce ideas off of, and fight through challenges side by side with.
That is why we are assembling some of Augusta’s brightest on July 12th to discuss building tools and workflow automation. Austin will be doing a lightning talk about Webpack, Michael will be talking about Terraform, Marshall will be discussing NPM Scripts, and Jamie will do a presentation on MSBuild. This is going to be a great learning experience and a really cool way to get involved in the local developer community.
