How We Kickstarted Our Frontend/JS Chapter Event Series
December 20 marked the first meeting of our Frontend/JS Chapter. This one was actually the first formal meetup intended to mark the start of the Chapter and present its roadmap and the goals.
FYI, there are 28 of us in the Chapter including two awesome moms who are in a maternity leave right now.
We started with the simple question of why we need a Chapter anyways. Thus, among many other reasons, we need a Frontend/JS Chapter:
- To bring technological alignment between the teams, so we don’t reinvent the wheel all the time
- Bring innovation into every project and make sure they are powered by the most recent technological advancements
- Make sure individuals and teams grow stronger faster
It’s not big news that SFL has got a bunch of really great projects. Each project has a dedicated team which consists of Backend and Frontend developers, a Scrum master, a Product Owner, a QA engineer and often a designer too.
Every project brings its unique challenges. This also means that the team working on resolving those challenges gains a lot of specific expertise (e.g., how to work with media in a browser or how to handle extreme node.js loads) which is a precious coin in our knowledge bank.
That said, there is an enormous knowledge-sharing potential across teams. You share what you have learned doing your project, and you get knowledge about what other teams learned doing theirs. This helps you speed up the workflow allowing you not to concentrate on solving problems that have already been addressed by the guru sitting next.
If you are wondering what the Chapter is going to cover, let me tell you that it’s going to include anything concerning frontend development as well as node.js projects and surrounding technology. Pretty much any environment where you can write JavaScript.
Solving all of the above is not an easy task, but we have a plan, to begin with. We are going to solve the problems through:
- Shared repositories for code and documentation where everyone is contributing
- A lot of presentations and workshops
- Personal training and conferences
- Working on open source projects and more
And, of course, like behind any other great initiative, there is philosophy behind ours too. The number one thing here is that we are interested in core technologies rather than frameworks and tools. We value personal growth. We want every member of the Chapter to take their knowledge and skills to many levels up!
Summing up our first meetup, we agreed on our future activities which will most probably include “hacker day-offs” (naming things is my craft, lol) during which devs have no sprint activities whatsoever and can come up with awesome one-day open source or research projects to implement and, maybe, share with the community. In addition, we will organize hackathons too which are a regular thing at SFL.
About this author:
Gagik Arustamyan is the Frontend/JS Chapter lead at SFL. He is passionate about technology and innovation, and he believes that knowledge is meant to be shared.
