OpenHack

Columbia, SC

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Info

OpenHack Columbia meets alternating months at IT-oLogy and CETi. Please message Karl McCollester (@karlmccollester) or Raghav Badiger (@itzamyth) with suggestions or questions.

Next meetups

  • Our next Open Hack is on July first at IT-oLogy

Past meetups

####May 6th May 6th was at CETi and had close to 30 attendees! We took at break in June for the SC Day of Civic Hacking

####April 8 Our first meetup was on April 8th and had about 20 attendees. Thanks to all the hackers who joined us! picture

The OpenHack Format

much thanks to Berlin’s OpenHack site for this format

We have a little structure around our meetings to give people a chance to spea k, 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.

  • 6:00pm Meet at IT-oLogy (Suite 200)
  • 6:15pm Introductions (stand-up style)
  • 6:45pm Hack
  • 8:30pm “Bring it to the Tribe”

We’ll begin with introductions at 6:15. Just say who you are, what you do and wh ere 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 wha t 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. Th at’s 3 hours. You can pair up with somebody or work totally alone - it’s totally up t o you. We encourage you to pair just for the fun of it, but nobody’s going to even -remote ly- 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 cal l “bring it to the tribe”. The idea is that as a community of developers, engineers and comp uter scientists, we’re a “tribe” of sorts. So we need to help each other out. OpenHa ck - 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 wra p-up is designed to give people a chance to present a problem they may be having (code r elated) to the group. Things like, “I can’t seem to grasp rspec’s DSL, can anybody recommen d a good book or resource”, or “does anyone have any tips on how to convince my boss to l et me re-implement this crufty old system written in outdated perl scripts as a REST-b ased SOA since it would be just so much cleaner?”. Things like that are what the tribe se ssion is meant for, and we want to provide an open, official forum for members to ask eac h 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 organizer, Karl McCollester @karlmccollester