The experience of a developer drop-in

Michael Brunton-Spall explains what happened during the first week of developer drop-ins and why you might want to sign up for the rest of the events

Michael Brunton-Spall

Published on Tuesday, 10 May 2011

Computing   Programming  

Yves Rossy parachute
Yves Rossy parachute Photograph: Michel Setboun/EPA

As I sit here writing this I’m surrounded not just by the usual Guardian developers, but also by about 12 other devs who have decided for this afternoon that the Guardian will be their home. There’s a real sense of activity in the room, a collection of Guardian devs to my left are discussing the latest features of the Lift web framework with one senior developer patiently explaining a concept to a couple of the other developers. To my right, the organisers of tonight’s Twitter Dev Nest are preparing their final slides and carrying on a friendly discussion.

I’ve just been asked to review some code by Can as he wanted a second opinion, and happily spent 15 minutes looking through the code and suggesting a few improvements. After that I’ve been preparing for the Twitter Dev Nest tonight and the redis meetup tomorrow.

This is the experience of a developer drop-in, a chance for like-minded geeks to come and meet up in the Guardian offices, to meet some Guardian developers, maybe chat with a journalist or two or just get some work done.

The first week has now finished and we’ve been pleased with the number of people turning up, but we want to meet more of you, we want to see what you are working on and we want to show you some of the cool things we’ve been doing. You could be part of this event, you could be participating in the associated activities, you could be expanding your network of contacts, and you could be part of a wider network of developers.

Sign up on the form we posted earlier to let us know you are coming, or just tweet us on the day at @gdndi and we’ll let you know whether we’ve got space.

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