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YorkTechFest
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27 Nov 2018
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Making the YorkDevelopers conference happen
November 13th 2018 saw our first ever “York Developers” conference - YorkTechFest. Back in 2016, Daniel, Chris and myself were sat at our “Code and Coffee” meetup in York discussing how it would be great if one day we could put on our own tech conference in York. We also decided to register ourselves as a registered charity with the Charity Commission which we achieved in March 2018. At the start of Summer 2018 we decided to try and put on the small conference this autumn. Daniel then jumped into action and before long was busy meeting people and quickly arranged partnerships with York Digital City (part of City of York Council) and York St John University.
We knew from the start that we wanted the event to be based around the various York based technical groups, but we weren’t sure at first about the best format for the event. Not having put on a conference before we had a number of questions:
- Should we have a keynote speaker?
- Would everyone attend the same set of talks, or should we have several tracks in a parallel?
- Should we charge for the event? if so how much. On one hand we don’t want to charge for education, but on the other hand we felt that a small would encourage to turn up on the night.
- Should the event be run during the day or at night? On a weekend or weekday?
- Would people expect food and drink?
- What should the event be called?
What was the event identity to be?
Being a community based event we decided to turn to the community to find out what people wanted and we did a poll at a “Agile York” meetup in June 2018 to find out what people were prepared to pay (if anything). Surprisingly a figure of £10 was on average acceptable.
We spoke to Henry (who runs the York Swift group) and Kevin (who runs the dotnetYork group) and Tony (who runs AgileYork) about their experiences about other technical conferences they had attended.
The plan taking shape
A plan then began to take shape, we picked a date and time and started to tell a few people about it. A common response was “do you have a website we could look at?” I set about and put together a highly advanced technical website using all the latest development tools. (Actually, I copied the YorkDevelopers site and edited it using Notepad). I have to admit that initially the site was a bit short of information, as we had not yet decided on the number of tracks or who the speakers were. We then begin to ask people to come and speak and the whole we had positive responses! As people sent in their Bios we added their details to the website.
Planning the sessions
One of our concerns was getting a equal distribution of attendees between the different tracks. We solved this by asking people to choose the sessions they wanted to attend in advanced. The only change to the time table we had to make was to merge the two York Code Dojo sessions into a single session.
Ticketing
We started selling tickets about 3 weeks before the event. As with a lot of meetups, after the initial flurry of signups the sale of tickets came to an almost halt. We were low on numbers; so it was time to do some marketing, this was mainly posting on social media and emailing various contacts we all had. (As Treasurer I allocated a marketing budget of around £0). Not sure if it was due to our marketing but as the evening of the event approached the sale of tickets ramped up. To the extent that we had to release additional tickets and then put a waiting list in place.
Tech Non Profit Exhibition
A couple of other groups in York (YorkHackSpace, and YorkExplore and Guild of Media Arts) contacted us and asked if they could have ap prescence at event. We welcomed them and they created a small exhibition of tech non profit groups in York. This formed our event identity – a showcase of tech non profit groups in York.
And one sign that it was a great event
I knew it was going well when my teenage daughter asked if she could come and help-out at the event. We asked her to be a YorkTechFest Youth Ambassador booking people in for the event.
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David Betteridge is a Co-Founder of YorkDevelopers.org, a dedicated group of software engineers in York providing meetups for technology professionals in York. David is an accomplished Software Architect with a proven track record of designing scalable solutions.
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How to Share Code
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11 Jun 2017
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Sharing Your Code
Like many open source projects and communities, we use “GitHub” to store, version and share our source code. At the end of each code dojo session we would like you to add your code to our repository so that others can learn by viewing all the various solutions. As using GitHub for the first time can be quite daunting I’ve put this step by step guide to get you started.
Registering
In your browser go to https://github.com/ and complete the form allowing you to sign up.
Note: The username will be used to form part of the URL to your source code. For example, one of my repositories has the URL https://github.com/davidBetteridge/TaskVisualiser as my username is davidbetteridge.
After your username, has been accepted you will be asked what type of plan you wish to use. For now, pick the Unlimited public repositories for free option.
Warning: Picking the free plan only allows you to create public repositories. This means that any source code you store in github will be visible to the entire world. This includes any files you check in with passwords in!
Software
The next task is to install some software on your development machine. Although graphical tools do exist, most developers use the command line interface.
First make sure that git isn’t already installed by opening a command prompt and typing “git”. If it’s already installed, then you can skip the rest of this section.
In your browser visit https://git-scm.com/downloads and click the icon for your operating system.
Download and install the version for your operating system. (For windows this is just a case of following the wizard, I haven’t tried it on Linux or Macs.)
The Process
Now we are ready to start adding some source code. There are a few steps to carry out so it seems quite complicated at first but you will soon get used to it.
Fork
When you “Fork” the source code it means that you are taking you own copy so that you can work in complete isolation to the original code.
In your browser visit the URL https://github.com/yorkCodeDojo and find the repository for the code you were working on during the code dojo.
Once you are viewing the repository, click the “Fork” button
This should create a copy of the repository, but within your own account.
Clone
Next is to clone the code from your GitHub account onto your development machine.
Click the Clone or Download option and then copy the URL onto your clipboard
Open a command prompt on your development machine, ensure you are in the folder in which you wish to create the code and type git clone followed by the url
If it all goes to plan, then it should download all the current code in the repository onto your machine
Add
Now you can add your pair’s source code to your local copy. Begin by making a folder based on your first names and language used. For example, david_daniel_fsharp. Try to avoid non-standard characters such a # sign.
Once you have added your source code to the folder use the git add command. You can either use git add . to add all files, or git add filename to add individual files
Type git status to view the files you have just added. If you have added files by accident, then use the git reset command.
Local Commit
The next step is to confirm your changes within the source control system on your development machine.
For this type git commit -m “Message” where message is a comment you wish to store against the check in.
Push
Currently your source code is only on your local machine. You need to also push it up to your account on GitHub. For this we use the git push command.
If you now look at your account on git hub you should see the code, you have just added.
Pull Request
Finally, you need to request that your changes are pulled into the original repository on the York code dojo account
Click the New pull request button
And then Create pull request
Add a comment and then click Create Pull request (again!)
I should now get an email telling me there is a new pull request. Once I’ve reviewed it I’ll click Merge and your source code will be included.
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David Betteridge is a Co-Founder of YorkDevelopers.org, a dedicated group of software engineers in York providing meetups for technology professionals in York. David is an accomplished Software Architect with a proven track record of designing scalable solutions.
Daniel Woolfson is a Co-Founder of YorkDevelopers.org, a dedicated group of software engineers in York providing meetups for technology professionals in York. Daniel is also a co-organiser of the York Code Dojo and MagentoYork.
