Project Night Meta - Ruby Tuesday - Pitch

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. -Douglas Adams

Thursday, 25 July, 13

Hi my name is Xander Miller.I want to start my presenation with a quote about space.“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-‐ bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” -‐Douglas AdamsThis quote talks about a really big thing, space. We really can’t appreciate how big space is. And more interestingly there are lots of things in life smaller than space but still far too big for us mere humans to comprehend. For instance right now you are part of something big and may have not even considered how big it is. You are in a rails developer presentation night in Ottawa and that alone is pretty awesome. We have a great community here.


But we are aren’t the only rails meetup. In many major cities in Canada there are groups like ours. The same is true for major cities in the states. This is a screen shot of meetup.com search for rails groups with no distance limit. We have San Antonio, NYC, Tokyo. In many major cities all over the world rails groups are meeting up. Heck, We just had a presentation by developers in Australia.And that’s just rails, there are Java Script groups, python groups, .net groups. You are part of a big and growing trend of developer meetups.

Presentation Nights

Project Nights


These diverse groups have some things in common they have presentation nights and they have project nights and each type of event poses its own logistical challenges. And these logistical challenges can be hard to overcome.

Organizing Presentations

Project Information

Collaborative Coding

Project Communication


For presentation nights you need a way to organize presentations, sort through presentation pitches, and after the presentation is done the challenges don’t stop. Often many participants want a copy of a presenters notes and slides. You have to arrange and communicate some sort of mechanism of distribution of those notes and slides.Project nights also pose many unique challenges, Sirst there is the problem of sorting people. Which people are there looking to help with projects and which people have projects they need help with. Also people with projects need to be able to explain their projects efSiciently to the people interested in helping with projects. So the people wanting to help with projects can make an informed decision about which project they want to help with. Then once a group has been established it is often very hard to communicate with each other. There is email, chat, other services, which do you use, wait how do you even communicate to people what to use, once you’ve decided.And of course there is always the problem of working collaboratively on code. GitHub solves that problem.

No Unified Tool


In fact most of these problems can be solved individually by existing apps already out there but then you have to communicate what tools you are using for what problems. And this can create a whole new set of problems. Meta problems.You now have problems dealing with problems and there is no uniSied solution.But we are developers and we can build the tools we need. So I’m proposing a project night project to build this uniSied tool.

Project Night MetaThe project night project that’s all about project night.


I call it Project Night Meta. Meta meaning self referencing because it is a project night project that is all about project night. Its a way we can help ourselves but also help this incomprehensibly big and growing movement of developer groups around the world.


I’m not interested in hacking on this alone. I’m looking for help and input. I want to hear from some of the long time organizers what challenges they routinely face and what sort of app they wish they had to solve it. I want experienced developers with their wisdom and advice on how to do things the right way. I want inexperienced developers to help too with their wild creativity helping challenge convention. So this idea isn’t even off the ground and could go in alot of directions from here. But we need to start somewhere so I’ll give you a brief sketch of what I envision. Basically, we don’t reinvent the wheel. We still use the great apps that are already out there we just build a hub app that links the existing apps together using their APIs in a way that suits our needs and workSlow. We use Meetup for organizing the location and announcing the events. GitHub for a code repository and Twitter Lists to help people working on a project together communicate. We have our hub app pull the information we need from all of them and organize it into a uniSied project view.

Join the Basecamphttp://www.xandermiller.ca/top7


That’s the pitch, we code for ourselves and that larger community of developer nights that we are all a part of. On project night we work on a project to facilitate project nights. I’ve started a basecamp for this and I hope you’ll join me there. Here is a link to a static site with a link to a Google form where you can submit your email to join the project. I’ve also posted the link in the meetup event comments. My name is Xander Miller. I’m a data science samurai. Ruby ninjas, hack with me.

Project Night Meta - Ruby Tuesday - Pitch

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