Harmony Hackathon: the beginning of something big?

This story starts somewhere between 7 and 10 mnths ago, when I was talking to my friend @cbilson during a break in a pairing session. We had previously talked about give camps and coding for causes events. This led us to the fact that we both liked the idea but felt it could be more targeted. We had also talked about renting some space from the facility my wife works at for the South Sound .Net Users Group to hold a workshop.

The idea stuck with me, my wife works for a non-profit after all and I had worked for one recently. I talked to my wife about an idea I had brewing. The place she works for just so happens to be one of the premiere Cancer Retreat facilities in the Northwest (if not the world[but don’t tell them]). Where is it that she works you ask, Harmony Hill …. just about the most centering place on earth (ok yeah I know I’m REALLY biased).  Anyway back to the story. I bounced the idea of my cohorts including @NotMyself . Every person I brought the idea to thought it would be amazing. So I decided to move forward with what would become Harmony Hackathon.

Harmony Hill agreed to support the group by providing hospitality services and lodging for the entire group while they were on the hill. I can not even begin to tell you how amazing this staff is, for 48 hrs 12 of the finest developers in the northwest didn’t want for anything!

The setup on my part was pretty easy, invite some of the best programmers in the northwest and ask them to do the one thing they love, code!, for charity…. plus I promised them beer! It worked… attendance was limited by the number of beds we had available for people to sleep in. It was only seconds after sending out the first request did I have people signed up to the eventbrite site.

Finally the day arrived to begin the Hackathon and you could say the excitement in the room was palpable. We started with introductions to the projects (we had initially intended to run to two projects) and to the facilities. We then headed down to the first of several amazing meals on The Hill. After dinner is when the real excitement began. We had decided on building the needed registration/waitlist management tool which is centered around available beds at the retreat center. @darkxanthos took the reigns as PM/customer liaison person and began gathering requirements for the developers to start working with. There was a lot of desire to start coding but also a deep understanding amongst the group that we must first understand the problem before we can solve it. A lot of effort went into making sure we focused on breadth and not rabbit holing ourselves on a single problem. Once again Justin did a great job and with the help of Rodica and Aeden a group of requirements was beginning to emerge as a set of mockups.

We began building out the plumbing and infrastructure of the project and decided on a couple of technology choices… MVC 3 and the default Razor view engine that comes with it.

The next 40 some hours of the weekend were a frenzy of coding…. pulling changes and merging changes…. I swear if nothing else our git skills improved. There were times that a person might have to pull again after merging changes from the last commit only to find out that they were still behind master. It was crazy, as a matter of fact you can see for yourself, thanks to a video from @NotMyself showing the gource animation of what happened.

We didn’t exactly finish, but we did cover some really awesome ground and learn a lot about how to manage such a gathering. A couple of the things we learned are kind of obvious but extremely powerful.

1. While it is exciting to see what can be started from nothing, it is a really good idea to be aware of the problem space to get the best results out of the group. Have a small group meet with the product owner at least once before the event date to flush out stories to keep the team working and not waiting. You can do more the day of the event but you need a foundation to work against.

2. Smaller teams truly do work best. Even a team of 12 is too large optimal is about 5-6. We learned that with all the commits and furious amounts of work we couldn’t help but all get in each others way no matter how much we tried not to.

3. You need a dictator. Sometimes the group can not come to a decision about technology (who’da thought a bunch of Alpha geeks couldn’t agree ) so someone has to be able to make a decision and cast that extra vote. I wouldn’t personally say you need to use this power often, only when the group seems to be wasting time arguing over some tech that doesn’t directly solve the problem. I say this because it is extremely important that the group be open to exploring lots of new spaces so that the benefit is not only to the PO but also to the developers.

4. Infrastructure is important. You really need to have the core infrastructure laid out and decided on before you get started. We chose to use ASP.Net MVC because we are mostly all web developers and are familiar with the technology. We also chose NHibernate and StructureMap as we were all familiar with them as well (well maybe not StructureMap but its concepts are universal … see we learned stuff). This meant there was some setup that was needed to get all the plumbing in place. Had this been ready at a cursory level earlier we would have spent less time shaving that particular Yak.

So the ultimate question remains. Will we do it again? The answer is quite simple, OF COURSE !!! The group learned a lot from the experience and the project continues to move forward. As a matter of fact last night while talking with my wife she informed me that they had already started to talk about how the product could help with other programs at Harmony Hill. We have already started to think about how to plan for the next one and how to get the most out of the event.

The ultimate goal…. start something amazing to help out not only this one organization but potentially help out many others. Start a tradition of greatness and see the program grow. Which is good because we might just need that waitlist manager to help out with the future waitlist for Harmony Hackathon 2012.