Engineer Prep Meetup Agenda
We've found the agenda below to be a good starting place for a meetup of engineers about a week before the main event. People tend to be eager to get started ahead of time, so using this time to help folks set up their resources is valuable. The attendees of this meetup also then can help get folks who can only show up to the weekend of up to speed, and be your allies in the room to keep the event and the projects moving.
Our mission statement - reviewing our values
We are driven by a duty to serve the folks leading this movement. Our role is not to disrupt [ISSUE AREA] — we are organizing to better serve organizations and groups already working in [ISSUE AREA].
We acknowledge that workers on the ground know the fight best, and it is our role to listen and make their lives easier.
In short, we build with the existing community, not for.
To build the power of these communities, we are cooperative, not competitive.
We respect the abilities of our teammates. We expect that our teams will be made up of people at different levels of understanding, and we recognize that people learning new things empower them to contribute to our cause in new ways.
We are working on a sensitive issue, with sensitive data
These organizations are doing crucial work in a challenging political climate. [DISCUSS SOME THREAT MODELING SPECIFIC TO YOUR ISSUE HERE]
To reflect the fact we’re working with sensitive data, we should follow some specific guidelines in our work:
Avoid discussing individual-level cases on social media! Talking about the work you’re doing for an organization and how important it is -- A+ and a great idea! Talking about the experiences of someone who hasn’t told you it’s cool to talk about their experiences is a bad look.
Minimize the collection of personally identifiable information to what you need to make the app run, especially at first. If you aren’t collecting it, it can’t leak!
Follow general best practices for development. At a minimum, use SSL and don’t store passwords in plaintext. The HIPAA guidelines (http://info.medisked.com/blog/bid/266364/Your-checklist-for-HIPAA-compliant-software - see especially unique identifiers and auto logoff) and 2-factor authentication are good practices to follow as well.
General How To Hackathon guide
What to expect
Pitches are Friday night, and teams form shortly after
Advertise yourself on Slack on team channels or your #skill channel
You get to go home at night. Self-care is important.
Drink plenty of water! Take a walk once in awhile!
Resources
Hackathon app skeleton repos: there are tons available.
Lets also assemble off-the-shelf dev service trials. Add them here:
Guide to organizing teams with technical and non-technical contributors
Any contribution is appreciated.
If you’re excited to guide/mentor less experienced engineers, invite them to your project!
Pair program the scaffolding of your project, then break up to work on sub-problems
Less experienced techies can test!
DCAF is an example of a super well-organized org built on volunteer time by folks of a range of experience levels - what can we learn from their example?
Narrowed goals to a very strict MVP for a single user and ignored as much other stuff as they possibly could
Took features in MVP and turned them into two week sprints, which let them work around things that turned out to be time consuming or hard
Carved features up into sub-items and steps, and had people work on them either individually or in pairs (preferring pairs!)
Utilized a project manager whose job it was to keep things moving, get questions by engineering team members resolved, and keep everyone well fed
Avoid every hard engineering problem possible
Got the first iteration of the product in front of end users as soon as possible
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