Building A (Mobile App) Developer Community
Last year, despite being very happy at my workplace, I started worrying about my growth…I worried that I lacked a means by which I could grow and develop my specialist knowledge — like around iOS development, in my case.
What I thought we lacked was a community — something I had learned about in a book by Emily Webber — Building Successful Communities of Practice. In it, Emily says you should consider a Community of Practice if any of these are true…
- You have ever felt unsupported and frustrated at work, feeling like you are expected to have all the answers and no one to talk ideas through with or to give you feedback
- You are leading a department, organisation or profession and want to create ways for people to learn and help them love their work
- You are in charge of learning and development, or training budgets, and are looking for ways to get more value for staff
- You are responsible for line management, hiring and professional development and want to find ways to support growing talent within your organisation rather than always turning to contractors or suppliers
- You want to find ways to get a deeper understanding and knowledge of what you do by connecting with others like you
Aha! That last one especially resonated with me so I decided to try out building a community. I decided to try something very small and then iterate on it…
I’d noticed from our stand ups that, being quite a large group, we had to really focus and keep them very tight. This meant that if, say, I was working on Sign In, whilst Rachel was working on Indexes, we might say a single line each before heading back to our desks — despite working on the same codebase, in the same room, often seated right next to each other. Our level of shared understanding was whatever ad hoc conversations we might later have — from casual kitchen interactions, to rubber ducking, to that age old cry for help…
So, I proposed a new ceremony that I learned from working with a team from ThoughtWorks — a daily huddle straight after stand-up. A huddle is where we essentially do another stand-up but in much more technical detail and with permission to ask questions, discuss, debate and whatever else we need for everyone to have a good idea not just what everyone else is doing, but what they are doing. They were an immediate success with the feedback being very positive.
But, whilst Huddles are great for introducing communication at a deeper, more specialist level, they do little to address learning.
So, in April last year we held our first News Apps iOS Developer Forum. I communicated that the purpose of the forum was to share ideas around new coding design pattern proposals but it quickly expanded out to wider ideas, shared articles, more design patterns, anything really that could contribute an improvement to our ways of working.
This forum has led to a number of changes including
- New linter rules
- New design patterns
- Agreed code smells
Since then we have met irregularly, but often, and, on order to remove myself from the being the centre of gravity for everything, Rachel is now the organiser, not me.
The Forum convinced me that these kinds of meetings were valuable and so I decided to go for the full thing. So, last month we kicked off the first(as far as I know) BBC iOS Community of Practice. In attendance were developers from
- Internal Software Engineering
- News Apps — Public Service
- News Apps — GNL
After a round of introductions we ran it in the lean coffee style…
Since then we have set up a slack channel (one of the actions) which now includes developers from
- News Apps — Public Service
- News Apps — GNL
- BBC+
- Weather
- Internal Software Engineering
- Mobile Platform
And I’m currently trying to find a date, a room, and a video tool to make the next one happen but I couldn’t be more excited about where we’ve got to in just 18 months. We now regularly talk to each other in a highly technical way and it truly feels like a set of communities that nurture me to grow as an iOS developer.
So, you might be thinking “That’s really nice for these iOS developers” which is totally fine (and true!)
Or just maybe… “I wish we did something like a huddle, a forum or a community of practice”.
In which case I suggest you just do it…
You don’t need anyones permission. If you do it at the start/end of the day it’s not even on work time - but I would encourage you to try to get buy-in from someone that can permit you to do it in work hours as it’s more inclusive that way (which is what we do here at the BBC).
You don’t need a particular job title or skills (may be not too much fear of public speaking)
You don’t need any special tools or rights (just book a room)
You don’t even need a room, — you can do it all over video if that’s what you need to do.
And if I can help then come find me on Medium, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
