[Chicago] Fw: Idea: weekly Chicago coding sprints?

[Jason R Huggins]

Joshua McAdams wrote on 06/10/2006 10:33:51 PM:
> So will building TECHcoffee be the focus of the first sprint?  And
> when is the first sprint?  This Monday?

1) I hope building TECHcoffee won't take much time at all, at least at 
first...

On that note, I've 'created' one already:
http://techcoffee.infogami.com/

(Infogami is run by the same guys who run Reddit.com and created the 
web.py library. Infogami is a wiki-ish, blog-ish, web-site creation tool, 
that I'm *pretty sure* is also written in Python.)

I imagine a more taylor-made site for TECHcoffee could be useful, but 
those requirements won't emerge until we have one or two TECHcoffees 
completed.

2) I should be careful how I describe what the focus of the sprints will 
be. The goal for TECHcoffee (the way I see) is to foster getting hackers 
together in a place to work together (or solo) on the projects that they 
care about... So if 5 people show up... there could be 5 projects being 
worked on... I imagine it more like a cross between "study hall" and a 
running club... Of course, if 5 people show up and work on 1 project (like 
the ChiPy meeting scheduler webapp), then that's totally cool too. The 
point is, by making a weekly commitment to show up, the chances of cool 
stuff getting done increases (I hope) quite a bit. In the spirit of 
OpenSpaces 
(http://www.openspaceworld.org/cgi/wiki.cgi?OpenSpaceExplanations), the 
whole point (for me) is to facilitate the place to meet... What gets 
worked on and by whom is up to the people who show up.

3) *Not* this Monday (June 12) at least officially...  I'll go out on a 
limb here and say the first TECHcoffee will be Monday, June 19th, 6-8 a.m. 
in the Loop (near an L stop I hope). Place to be determined.

I, however, will be going on a "scouting" mission tomorrow morning to 
scout out possible sites for the first meetup. I also want to give it a 
week for the news to spread out to the Ruby/Perl/PHP/.NET/Java 
communities, have a few folks hype/blog it, and get some "buzz". 

If other folks on this list want to wake up tomorrow and start scouting 
out locations between 6 - 8 a.m., too, that's totally cool. How bout this:

Taking John Melesky's suggestion... I hope to be done scouting around 7:30 
and will be at the Starbucks at LaSalle and Lake from 7:45 to 8 a.m. If 
anyone else wants to go scouting, too... Do it on your own (or email me if 
you want to tag along), but let's meetup at the Starbucks to compare notes 
at 7:45. Just ask the folks at the counter where I'm (Jason Huggins) 
sitting.

My scouting sites for tomorrow are:
* Citigroup Center/Ogilvie
* Starbucks/Panera/Cosi/Corner Bakery (which ones yet to be determined)
* Allegro hotel

- Jason