NWE.pm Hackday lessons learned

[pozorvlak]

Last November a few of us from Glasgow.pm went to the North-West England Perl Mongers Hackathon, kindly hosted by Shadowcat Systems at their offices in Lancaster. The following are my notes on the day; I'd intended to present them at Glasgow.pm's December meeting, but the weather meant it was put off until the January meeting last night.

1. The night before, I met up with my friend Caroline for a drink. We hadn't seen each other for a couple of years, and it turned out that we had a lot of catching up to do, so one drink turned into two, which turned into five, which turned into a gig. Then I got up very early and got on one of these, which made me feel like this.
   
   So, Lesson Learned number 1: do not go out and get steaming the night before the Hackday, especially if you're travelling there by a very juddery train.


2. Some Modern Perl modules have very long dependency lists: Task::Kensho, for instance, depends on all of these modules. CPAN is great, but installing and testing all of those modules takes a long time. So, Lesson Learned number 2: if the project you're going to be working on has some dependencies, or is planned to have some dependencies, then find out what they are and install them beforehand. Dually, if you're running a hackday project and you plan to depend on some module or other, tell people about it and encourage them to install it in advance.


3. Lesson Learned number 3: you're going to need a version control repository sooner or later - you might as well set it up in advance and write the URL on the whiteboard for everyone to see when they come in. For a Hackday setup it's probably better to use a push model than a pull-request model; GitHub will support this, but you need to create a Hackday user and add everyone's ssh public keys to its keychain.


4. Communication is really hard. My first commit was at 16.47 because we spent so long arguing about what exactly Oyster was meant to do and how it was meant to work. Most of the time this was because there were people still arguing about things that I'd thought were settled.
   
   So, Lesson Learned number 4: this is one of those cases where it's better to make a decision now than to make the best decision when it's too late and everyone's gone home. And when you've made your decision, communicate it clearly.


5. Other lessons learned: Shadowcat (and NWE.pm more generally) are great people, Osfameron is a dude, pizza is tasty, and hackathons are great fun.

Thanks once again to the Shadowcat team for a great day.

Comments

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think we went the gitosis route in the end. MST handled that side of things.