OpenHack

Berlin, Germany

Upcoming Meetups

The first OpenHack Berlin will take place on 4. April at Co.up.

We plan to organize one meetup per month, follow OpenHackBER on Twitter, join the group on Meetup.com or subscribe to our mailinglist to get updates about future meetups.

The OpenHack Format

We have a little structure around our meetings to give people a chance to speak, bounce ideas off others, and “break the ice” for anyone who hasn’t met before. we are loosely adopting a structure that has worked well for other OpenHack meetups.

  • 19:30 Meet at Co.up
  • 19:45 Introductions (stand-up style)
  • 20:00 Hack
  • 23:00 “Bring it to the Tribe”

We’ll begin with introductions at 7:15. Just say who you are, what you do and where you do it (if you want to), what languages/frameworks you work with, and anything else you want to share. This is just to let everybody get to know each other and see who does what so others can help/pair with them, or ask for help if you know something they don’t.

Next is the hack session. This is what OpenHack is all about - slingin’ code. That’s 3 hours. You can pair up with somebody or work totally alone - it’s totally up to you. We encourage you to pair just for the fun of it, but nobody’s going to even -remotely- have a problem if you don’t.

You can hack on anything you want. Open source, closed source. Work. Play. Any skill level on anything on any project, it’s all good as long as you’re here to sling code.

Finally, we’ll wrap up with a segment that, for lack of a better term, we’ll call “bring it to the tribe”. The idea is that as a community of developers, engineers and computer scientists, we’re a “tribe” of sorts. So we need to help each other out. OpenHack - for us anyway - isn’t just about the code, but also about the people who write it! So we want to leverage the collective widsom of our “tribe” to help each other. This small wrap-up is designed to give people a chance to present a problem they may be having (code related) to the group. Things like, “I can’t seem to grasp rspec’s DSL, can anybody recommend a good book or resource”, or “does anyone have any tips on how to convince my boss to let me re-implement this crufty old system written in outdated perl scripts as a REST-based SOA since it would be just so much cleaner?”. Things like that are what the tribe session is meant for, and we want to provide an open, official forum for members to ask each other for help in their present challenge. Maybe some one has experience, a book, or a contact who can help you out. This gives each of us a chance to leverage the group’s “tribal knowledge” to solve a problem.

We want feedback

OpenHack is about the hacker/developer community. This group exists to give you a repeated/predictable opportunity to get out and among your peers, hack on a project, develop connections with people, and have fun while being productive. So if you have ideas on how we can further that goal, or have ideas on our proposed format, either tweet the organizers, Friedemann Altrock @fwg and Martin Klepsch @mklappstuhl, or post a message to the above mailing list.