Weaving Communities
DevCJeddah Build Day 2018
Developers from Jeddah, Mecca, and Rabigh gathered at the Vibes Offices on the last Thursday in June, 2018. Some came to learn about the Community Challenge, some came for an interactive workshop on ReactJS. Yet, we were all there for the fellowship and communion of code in celebration of the spirit of co-creation, or in modern lingual, hacking.
A call to build communities
Theme of the year is “Build Communities Together”. Communities take many forms: in the intro talk, we explored the possibilities of community building online, supporting offline communities, and contemplate on potential ways where online communities could drive offline engagements. Our fellow developers pitched ideas on communal issues that they cared deeply about, and made calls of actions to entice potential recruits to their teams.
Hands-on ReactJS workshop
After a short prayer break, Usman Bashir took us on a 2-hour whirlwind tour on ReactJS, building from scratch a much needed utility for our meetup experience: a guest-list to easily check-in participants and register plus-ones on the fly. It was heart-warming to see how developers at different mileage on the technology help each other setup and debug. The cozy environment, healthy snacks and fresh coffee also helped bring life to the session.
Best things come last
An important bit of our meetup is always the post-mixer, where members get to freely connect with each other and make announcements over snacks and coffee. A local startup pitched an open position for ReactJS developers, an architect got connected with developers for some future projects. The growing shelf at the Vibes Office offers a spark for conversations: I happened to locate a signed copy of the book by a local entrepreneur whose work I very much admire. I also learned that the three ladies coming from Mecca heard about the event from an internal slack channel of a nano-degree study group, on which we never advertised: words of mouth do magic, especially in this region. Oh, did I mention I found a fellow evangelist Abdullah Alghamdi on another front-end framework?
Onwards and beyond
The fellowship we got to experience in these gatherings is what drives us to host meetups after meetups. I just can’t wait to see the coding and design talents that will fuse amongst our members in our next fellowship where we will build Camera Effects together. Huge thanks to Ahmad Mushtaq, Sam, Abbas, and Ziad for helping throughout the event. The awesome shots here are by Sam.
Until then, keep coding :)
Resources
- Join our community on Facebook here.
- Repo for the ReactJS Workshop here.
- Community Challenge details here.
