Coder meetings

[denise]

fu and I were talking this morning about a bunch of things, and we thought it might be interesting/useful to have biweekly or monthly irc coder "meetings", where people could talk about what they were working on, brainstorm about problems they're having, give updates on major/larger projects they're working on, ask for help or ideas on how to design or implement things, and just generally support each other. The reasoning being, when we're all scattered around the globe like this, it's hard to just walk down the hallway and sit on a team member's desk and bounce ideas off them, and that a) leads people to feeling isolated and out of the loop, b) makes it so that nobody really knows what anybody's working on, c) makes it hard to get a lot of support and encouragement, d) doesn't give anybody a real chance to "show off" the cool things they're working on, e) makes it easier to forget about DW stuff and push it down the priority list because you don't get that sense of social reward, f) reduces the chance that somebody will say something to you in passing that will give you a great idea for how to fix that thing that's driving you nuts, and g) doesn't give us all a chance to get together and brainstorm about what we should all be concentrating on, etc.

I'm envisioning an hour or so in irc, scheduled in such a way as to make it easy for people to attend, timezone-wise (or, since we're so geographically disparate, having two separate sessions, and people could attend one or both), held once or twice a month. For those who don't/can't irc, we could log the sessions and post them to dw_dev, both quick summaries/minutes and full logs (edited to remove irrelevancies such as join/part msgs and off-topic chatter).

I know that I would really appreciate something like that, since it's really easy to start feeling isolated and disconnected (even when you own the place!) when you're working from home and on incredibly weird schedules! Still, I don't want to go to the trouble of setting something up or working out the logistics if people wouldn't be interested. Therefore, a poll:

Poll #7281

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 23

View Respondents

Would you be interested in a biweekly or monthly DW irc coder meeting?

View Answers

Yes, absolutely!
13 (56.5%)

I'd maybe attend if the scheduling worked out.
9 (39.1%)

Not really my thing.
1 (4.3%)