Exciting Times - Two Great HackCamps Upcoming - Dev4Good and GiveCampUK

Hey Guys! Remember me?

Yes, it has been a while, and yes - I have been busy! I'll get another post up soon explaining what has been chewing up my time, but for now I wanted to get some buzz around two great-looking events coming up soon. What's best is that these hacks are just about hacking, they are about hacking with the intent of helping the third sector.

Why Bother with a Hack Camp?

As you may remember, last year I attended CharityHack, which was great fun and amazing to see what people are capable of producing in such a short space of time (lots of caffeine and pizza help).

For me, I think I would say that I go to these events to:

  • Learn from many smart people with a variety of skill sets.
  • Network with lots of like-minded people.
  • Build software for problems I may have never encountered before (very easy to get stuck in a business and only deal with their problems). I like to shake it up a bit.
  • Just hack - get away from it all and focus on building something awesome - lose the manager and business constraints and just focus on the "wow" factor. Very liberating.
  • Eat lots of pizza and drink lots of red bull!

And to be honest, even if an event just had two of the above points, I would still go. HackCamps are an all-round assortment of geeky goodness.

What About Companies?

While I am a hacker and obviously focused on hacker concerns, don't forget that these kind of events need support. These are a great opportunity for you to get your corporate brand out there into an audience that is normally "the right kind of people" (people motivated and passionate about their craft to surrender a weekend for it, for free).

Most events will have multiple levels of support that businesses can support them at, be it getting a few items of branded material into swag bags (normally free) or good 'ol sponsorship which will often result in a chance to speak about your business or slap your logo in a few key places.

As well as this, normally sponsors will be around to talk to the developers (and others - such as designers and UX people) which can provide a great opportunity to target an interested market, not to mention provide a great resource for hiring great people.

The opportunity should not be taken lightly - even if you don't find the awesome hire you are looking for at an event, the community will really appreciate your support - and regulars are well noticed.

Upcoming Events

There are a couple of pretty tasty looking events coming up soon that have me super-excited. Dev4Good and GiveCamp. Both are pretty similar in design - turn up, build awesome stuff to do good.

Dev4Good

GiveCampUK

So, what are you waiting for?! Come along to either/both and see what it's all about. Don't be nervous (I was at my first event) - we are all there for the same reasons and that is what counts!

If you are coming along, be sure to ping me on Twitter (@robcthegeek) and I will make sure I say "hi"!

Happy hacking!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GTD: Biphasic Sleep Experiment – Day 4

Physical State/Tiredness Same as yesterday really, awoke feeling really fresh and alert first thing in the morning. I again took a nap at work at 1230-1300. There has been a fair bit of interest about the napping at work so I thought I would take a minute to talk about it here (see below). Other than that, I did awake from my afternoon nap rather tired and groggy (took me 15-20 mins to get head together) but I actually think this is related to food since I ate a rather large pizza before sleeping.. :\ I have also found that even though it is great having the brain running longer, it can equally be hard to shut off. I have started going to bed with a book at 0200 so I can start to wind down to sleep mode for 0300. Staying up to 0300 is NOT a good idea, you really need to be going to sleep “ FOR 0300 ” not “ AT 0300 ”. Napping at Work Here’s what I do: At about 1200, I do a quick scoot around the team to see if there is anything they need from me, I then tie off any loose end
Read more

Privacy Online – How Much Would a “I’ll Google You” Get About You?

Image
Even though online privacy has been a subject that everyone has known about for a long time, I still cant help but feel that with the explosion in social networking, a lot of the basic principles seem to have been lost somewhere. By “principles” I mean: Make yourself as hard to personally identify as possible. People on the Internet should not be able to find where you live (unless you want them to). You need to protect your friends and family as well as yourself, don’t put their information on display without permission. In short, people should only ever know what you would be happy with someone shouting from a top of the building, with everyone stood around it, and pointing at you. Not sharing information from one source with another (e.g. automatic “I’ll email your friends for you, just give me your ID and password for [service]”. Some of the Problems There have been numerous issues with private information being found on the Int
Read more

TDD – Getting Started with Test-Driven Development

I have been expressing interest in getting up and running with TDD for quite some time, probably the best part of nearly two years in fact! (wow). I have always struggled to get going though. In my previous job I was pretty much flying solo, and even though I am in a 6-man team in my new job, we still are pretty isolated (not my choice!). Every time I have gone to the programming community and asked “how do I get started?” I pretty much got the same response wherever I went - “Just do it”. This was real frustrating because it can be so overwhelming, if you don’t know where to start, how can you start? So I started to dig deeper for as many TDD/Automated Testing sites as I could, even if it was pages and pages of stuff that I didn’t want to know, if I got one little snippet of something useful, I would be happy. I came across some great sites (links will follow). Some were very, very simple. Almost so simple that they don’t really cover the testing, they cov
Read more