uncodebar 5 — oops, we did it again
For the past five years, codebar has run uncodebar, an unconference for fans of code and diversity. It has become the place for the codebar community to come together and share knowledge, ideas and pasta recipes! Graciously hosted by the lovely people at Twitter for the third year running, and sponsored by your friendly neighbourhood GitHub, this year’s event was a great success. As well as helping us provide merch including handy Git cheatsheets and those iconic Octocat stickers, this sponsorship allowed us to pay travel expenses for several people from outside London to attend the event.
An unconference?
For those unfamiliar with the unconference format, here’s a rundown of how it works.
After a nourishing breakfast buffet and a quick welcome from Kaya, the charming MC of the event, the unconference begins with a pitching session. Anyone can queue up with their post-it note and offer guests a description of a potential session they’d like to run. From regular talks to round table discussions to bread making tutorials, anything goes. If enough interested hands go up, your post-it note is firmly sellotaped to the whiteboard, and your session is officially in the schedule. Once the board is full, and naturally, a digital copy made for everyone to access on their personal device of choice, it’s time to break out and begin.
The first rule of an unconference is that there are no rules. There are, however, four principles and one law, as governed by the Open Space technique.
The four principles are:
- Whoever comes are the right people.
- When it starts, it’s the right time.
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
- When it’s over, it’s over.
The law followed is the Law of Two Feet:
“If at any time you find that you are not benefiting from the discussion, neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet and move to someplace more to your liking.”
Essentially, these guiding principles exist to encourage participants to feel free to float between talks on game development and chatbots, grab a drink or take a break when needed, and not feel stuck in any space. After the scheduled talks and discussions have been held, the day is rounded off with lightning talks.
This year at uncodebar
We had talks on unicorns, cryptography, outside-in test-driven development, emojis! Tutorials in React Native, GitHub pages, Unity, SQL injection basics! Discussions on learning techniques, hackathons, which coding languages to learn and more…
One such discussion was the first bumper session in the commons area, “How to get your first internship/Things you wish you knew when you started”. As you can imagine, it was a wonderful mixture of developers from established tech companies and people who have never coded before, seated around one table discussing how to break into the industry. Advice was dispensed. Motivational Slack channels were shared. Insights were offered into the recruitment process. The age-old question was asked: “Can I get away with deleting my LinkedIn account?” Overall consensus: no.
Another conversation was hosted by Sean on the topics of privacy and data in tech. One of the aims of this was to figure out: “How do we build awareness of privacy and data sharing in different generations?” These days, so much of our personal data is shared and collected. As tech professionals, it is important to periodically stop, ask questions and wonder about our responsibility to make security more accessible to people. As one person pointed out, “All it takes is a law to be changed and we’re in an episode of Black Mirror.”
Counterintuitively more lighthearted was Thomas’s talk on Dark Agile.
“We call it a sprint because it makes it sound like we’re going as fast as we can… We can call it a saunter, it’s the same thing.”
This was an open safe space for talking about everything Agile, from what we value about the sacred processes to ways it has gone wrong in your company. And as usual, if it happens in your company, it probably also happens in a lot of places.
Person A: “It’s not just me, it’s everyone.”
Person B: “That makes me feel a lot better.”
Richard and Sam’s failure swap shop was both entertaining and reassuring, but unfortunately, with Vegas rules (what is shared in the swap shop, stays in the swap shop), you will just have to attend next year to find out exactly what was said.
These were just some of the many sessions held at this year’s uncodebar. Did you attend any others? What were your highlights of the event? And has anyone tried and verified whether Ju’s recipe really made the “Best Tomato Pasta of Your Life”??
