December is a good month to work on something serendipitous. We started a little experiment to sit a few random developers at a table to build something from scratch together. This wasn't anything big like a hackathon. We wanted to create a cozy (or as the Danish would say, hygge) space for people to get together to work on something fun. In the beginning of the month, I sent out this call for participation for a weekly hack night for December.

To my delight, a couple developers actually came on the first day!

Julia, Mark, and I spent our first gathering hashing out the idea for 99issues.

99issues is a Github issues discovery web application for finding easy/newbie issues in your favourite languages for use during dojos or hack days.

One of the deliverables that we got done on the first day was this memes. Priorities!

It was like musical chair for the rest of the month. People came, gone, and returned. Usually we have 3 to 4 people around the table. For each session, one person that were here the previous week would induct the newcomers on what's happening.

As you can imagine, this is a project management challenge. One thing we did well was spent time up-front to discuss user needs, draft requirements, and document design choices. So everyone that came onboard subsequently are clear on the direction. We documented extensively on pen and paper and on Github issues. For each session, we break down work into doable-for-the-day chunks and made use of the usual open source collaboration Gitflow process. Nothing special here. Just divide and conquer.

Another hurdle for us that occurred early on is that as it's a general functional programming group, everyone have their own programming language of choice. Mark is into F#. Julia is into Haskell. Nandan is into Javascript. And RasmusErik is into Clojure.

Seeing that we didn't actually commit any code after the first session, I sneakily bootstrapped the project in ClojureScript and that was the end of story for this language war. (Thanks guys for putting up with my dictatorship!)

After a grand total of 3 hack nights (we skipped 23 Dec), we managed to get the project shipped with a bare scaffolding. We still need to work on the design and flush out the functionality. Pull requests are welcome! I had a lot of fun working side-by-side and getting to know these guys at the pub. We have different background but share a love for programming. I'm looking forward to doing this again next time I'm in town.