Our very first Dev Hack was a success! Thank you to everyone that made it possible!
We spent two very productive days coding, testing and working on real issues for the global open source project. It was a great opportunity to expand our exciting community, bring in new people that believe in what we do and share our experience in building a successful remote open source community.
Alongside we celebrated some of the amazing local food that London has to offer, with a huge lunch supporting agroecological producers featuring French cheese (from Open Food France, our French colleagues), salad from Organic Lea, pulses from Hodmedods, local sauerkraut and much, much more. An enormous thank you to Hanna for making the feast possible!
Highlights:
- The amazing participants contributed some very high quality code and resolved over a dozen real issues that affect food producers and distributors in the UK and across the world
- Most of the attendees were WOMEN! In an industry dominated by men it was inspiring to meet so many talented and enthusiastic female coders!
- It was exciting for five members of the existing OFN community to come together for the event! And we were very happy to see Steve again who made massive contributions in previous years of the life of OFN.
- We were able to give great experience to new developers, most of whom this was the largest project they’ve ever contributed toward. We’ve even been able to provide references for one of the participants as they search for their first job as a software developer.
- Newspeak House is an incredible venue. Thanks to Ed for making us feel so welcome!
What we learned:
- That on a bank holiday weekend a lot of people cancel at the last minute! In future we will ask for a contribution toward food costs that we will refund at the event. This was we can still support local producers by buying food in advance, but don’t risk having more food than we can eat!
- In future we will seek partnerships to try and boost the event, bring in more new developers and aim to create more impact
- That running DevHacks is really worthwhile! We plan to run another in October as part of Hacktoberfest.
Here’s what some of our participants said:
“It was really valuable to contribute to a real world project with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and a professional development pipe. This will be great on my CV as a new developer!”
“It was a really insightful experience. I hope to come to a future event once I’ve done a boot camp and have more experience. Thank you for the amazing food!”
“Thanks to everyone, especially those who made/brought the delicious food and the new devs making first commits to the project!”
“Had great fun today and yesterday, thank you for this experience! It was amazing to meet all of you and I am looking forward to seeing you soon!”
