Voluntarily Code Camp: Auckland - July 13/14 2019

Owned by Andrew Watkins
07-07-2019
5 min read

Key messages

  • Event is open to all skill levels, and training is provided.
  • People will learn, have fun, make friends, and add value
  • Voluntarily.nz - Brings people together. 

Dates

  • 13/14th July - Open session

Getting People there

Numbers

Depends on advertising and what else is competing.

  • 10 - 20 - Plenty to achieve good work with
  • 20 - 50 - Amazing, the place will be buzzing
  • 50 - 80 - Intimidating but we can manage it.
  • 80  - practical limit, we won't be able to manage the workload effectively.

Promotional Materials

  • Online - we will provide Event specific space at Voluntariy.nz website.
  • Poster design.
  • Video and stuff based on the last event.

Registration

  • Sign up links on Voluntarily.nz


Date, Duration and Times

  • 2 days - e.g. full weekend.  
We found that with 1 day people are just getting started when they have to stop.
Something we have not tried is a weekday event. Don’t know what the turnout would be unless specific companies are giving staff time off
  • Times - These worked for us
    • 8:00 we have access to venue
    • 8:30 - 9:00 mingling and breakfast
    • 9:00 - gather and initial presentations
    • 10:00 work and tutorials
    • 4pm - day checkin/demos, 
    • Space available to 6pm  - its not an all nighter
    • Day 2 - open and breakfast from 8:00
    • Closing events around 4pm
    • End by 5pm.


Venue 

Friday will be internal at Westpac held at Westpac.

Sarah has managed to get approval for Datacom to host the public event on Saturday and Sunday at our Jervois Quay office (we’re hoping to provide some catering also – TBA).

 

Needs:

  • Room for however many you think will attend
  • Open and welcoming 
  • Space for
    • Tutorials and presentations
    • breakout / discussion corners
    • team work tables - usually 5 - 7 per team
    • Huddle / Chat areas.
  • Accessible power sockets for everyone's laptops
  • WiFi
  • Whiteboards and working pens.  Notepads
  • Easy to get to

Hospitality

  • Steady supply of tea/coffee/milo/ soda.
  • Bonus if there is proper available some of the time
  • Meals
    • Breakfast - e.g fruit. & pastries -  Helps to get people there before the start
    • Lunch - Support food preferences. 
      • Other times - plates of fruit and biscuits seem to keep everyone happy
  • Fun Things to do - games, stretching, competitions etc.
    • we did not try this yet - everyone seemed fully involved in the work. 

Activities

  • Start : Introductions, explain voluntarily, give overview of the tech, purpose and goals for the weekend
  • Form teams - around key goals and skill sets
  • Then Work and Tutorial streams
  • Day 2 - starts with stand up to see where everyone is at
  • Ends with Demonstrations and feedback.

Development Goals

These will change as we get closer but probably will include

  • Stabilisation of the MVP.
  • Search and Skills tags
  • Achievement Badges and Onboarding workflows
  • Prettification
  • Activity Workflows


Tutorials 

1. Dev basics - git, get codebase, build, test, commit, pull request. Add to Contributors 
2. Tour of the Code - pt1 Client side - React components, Pages 
3. Tour of the Code - pt1 Server side - Express, Next, API and Mongo DB
4. Advanced topics:  Redux, Asynch programming
5. More basics:  Testing,  Debugging. 

Rewards & Swag

  • We have given attendees native trees but you should decide what is relevant to the locality.
  • We considered some trophies for MVP, Team Builder, Design, Inspiration etc. but didn’t get them organized. Also judging is very hard. SO I prefer to reward everyone and give time/space for people to say what they valued from the experience.
  • Any corporate swag should be of real value and not generate waste. e.g credits for AWS or iTunes etc. but its not really necessary

Sponsors

  • Someone to pay for or provide the venue - Datacom
  • Someone to pay for hospitality Datacom


Mail out


Tēnā koutou

Thanks for signing up to come to our Voluntarily Auckland Midwinter Code Camp and to help us in create the Voluntarily.NZ platform. 

I can promise that you will have fun, learn stuff, meet great people, and add real value to an important project for New Zealand's young people.

If you have been following the project so far you'll know we have made amazing progress so far this year and we have enough functionality to start testing the service with teachers. You can catch up on some news at our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5ZhMU9Mc3JEXNLf2HDzNmCxp3hXWikwx

You may have noticed at change in the domain - we are now all at Voluntarily.nz   having moved from voluntari.ly - although the old links will still work.


Key info:

Start - 09:00 am Sat 13th May.  Breakfast from 8:15, Lunch provided at 12:00,  + Snacks.  Day ends at 16:00

Location: Datacom, 58 Gaunt Street, Auckland Central . (https://goo.gl/maps/AcgZxs9Af63qLAQf6) . 

Chat: Join us on Gitter: https://gitter.im/voluntarily/community  

Codebase: https://github.com/voluntarily/vly2.  

Kanban board: https://voluntarily.atlassian.net/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?projectKey=VP&rapidView=2

Documentation: Voluntarily Product

What you need to bring

Laptop, power cable, phone charger, yourself and others.  Please continue to promote the event through your networks we can cope with more people on the day but if they sign up online it will help with catering.

sign up at: https://voluntarily.nz/auckland

Is this just for coders?

No we will make good use of BA, Design, Architect, DevOps, Test, and general thinking and problem solving skills.

What if I don't know javascript/node/react/next etc?

We can teach you, there will be simpler tasks that you can help with, you can pair program with someone, you can test stuff, or you can help not re-invent the wheel by researching solutions.

Missions include

MVP road to production

All the basic functionality for our Minimum Viable Product is in place. but there are loads of fine details and small bugs to fix. Our goal is to get 'many eyes' on the system as it stands and work out the details.

We will start the day with a mass role play for teachers and volunteers running various scenarios

DevOps Challenge

We are going to be setting up our second staging site - beta.voluntarily.nz. This will allow us to run the pilot separately from the test/dev site on alpha.

Corporate Integration challenge. 

We have everything in place to allow us to display volunteering opportunities embedded in corporate intranet pages - but we need to create some custom pages without headers to provide the appropriate content.

Activity Challenge

And the next big feature to work on is Activities and Organisations.

Plus any amount of 

  • Testing - writing tests, and fixing the bugs they find.
  • Styling - making the pages look like the designs
  • Training/Learning - crash course in react, node, mongo and next etc.
  • Researching solutions.

Outline of the day

Saturday

8:15 Mingle and Breakfast.
9:00Welcome, purpose, the mission and approach to day  Kerry Topp and Vaughan Fergusson.
9:20Project & asset orientation - Andrew Watkins & Walt Lim.

10:00

Pick your teams & challengeTutorials
12:00Lunch
12:30Build Build BuildTutorials
15:00Demonstrations and sync up
16:00Theoretical close
17:00Bar meet up

Sunday

8:15 Mingle and Breakfast.
9:30Stand up - and plan for the day

10:00

Continue buildingTutorials
12:00Lunch
12:30Consolidate and Commit
15:00Demonstrations and what next
16:00End

Tutorials will include ( subject to demand )

  • Dev basics for contributors - git, get codebase, build, test, commit, pull request.
  • Tour of the Code - pt1 Client side - React components, Pages 
  • Tour of the Code - pt1 Server side - Express, Next, API and Mongo DB
  • Guide to the technologies: React, Mongo, Express etc.             
  • Advanced topics:  Redux, Asynch programming
  • Test and debug across the stack.
  • AWS and Dev/Ops information