The past few months have been a little busy, but also very exciting. The general theme seems to have been change.
Awesome new job
At the start of January, I joined Flow Interactive as Lead Front-end Developer. It’s a fantastic place to work: I’m surrounded by smart people doing interesting things all day, and it’s giving me the chance to learn a lot. I’m not just doing Front-end dev, either: I’m getting involved with the Usability Test and Product Discovery work that we do too. All of the testing was very interesting, but one of the big discoveries was that people don’t know what the hamburger nav menu icon thing means. Just because we’ve started putting it everywhere, doesn’t mean that people get it.
Cape Town Front-end Developers
It was all change for our January meetup. Our regular venue wasn’t available, so we ran around trying to find another one that had the right set up for us. We went to 6 Spin Street, and it worked out quite well. I’ll be happy to get back to our regular venue in February, though.
We also changed the format. Instead of one speaker for the whole session, we had three lightning talks. Our three speakers were great, but after chatting with them and the attendees, we’re thinking of doing just one or two speakers an evening, so that they have a bit more time to get into their topic.
There was a bit of a mix up with the dates. With the changing venue, we also had to change dates, and I neglected to update the details on our meetup group. Luckily, Shaun spotted it a day or two before, and I sent out a panicked announcement to all the attendees. The mixup, which was my fault, made me realise that I’m involved as an organiser in a few too many meetup events. I’m going to start dialling down my involvement with some of them. CTFEDs I’m going to keep: I helped start it, and it’s all about my day job.
RailsBridge Cape Town
The weekend just gone saw another RailsBridge Cape Town workshop: the third one that I’ve been involved with. This also had a couple of big changes. Most of the organisation (food, venue) was taken care of since it was part of the upcoming rubyfuza, but there was still the wrangling of teachers and students to be done, and the updating of the documentation to bring it up to date with the parent organisation overseas.
Another thing that was a bit of a change was the entrance criteria. Our tagline is “Free Ruby on Rails workshops for women and their friends,” but this was relaxed a bit for this workshop, promoting diversity in a more general way. I’m a bit conflicted about this. We didn’t groom the attendee list at all, but we ended up with about a 50/50 split of male and female attendees, which is great.
The workshop went well and, as usual, we’ve got lots of great ideas for how to make the next session even better. We’re taking a break for a week or two before diving back in and getting ready for our April event.