Spending seven months on discussion board and it was finally here, Developer Bootcamp 2014. Initial plan was to boot-up the existing coding skills of attendees to make contribution to Mozilla Code base & also other open sourced projects.
Organizing an event that is first of it’s brought its own difficulties, so we limited the attendees to 25 and making sure the attendees have experienced the organizing headaches in some forms in their life. With an audience capable of accepting sudden changes in plans and schedules gave us an extra hand in planing the event, for the information we had 4 Plan changes and the final & stable plan was rolled out 24 hours in advance of the event :).
Documenting the Undocumented
Primary agenda of this blog post is to make a Documentation on the idea of Developer Bootcamp, thought general procedures & elements of the event can be documented in Developer Bootcamp Wiki, event specific materials must stay out of WiKi to stay clean and act as an SOP.
This blog brings together all the activities happened during the event in Organization & in Participants perspective. For stories of what happened on the two days :
Schedules
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Develper Boot Camp 2014
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9th August 2014
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10:15 AM - 10:30 AM : Introduction
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM : Introducing Mozilla Code base , Projects and codes.
11:30 AM - 11:45 AM : Tea
12:00 AM - 12:30 PM : Bugzilla environment
12:30 AM - 01:00 PM : Intro to version control
Demoing git
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01:00 PM - 02:00 PM : (: LUNCH :)
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02:00 PM - 04:00 PM : Share Why u came for bootcamp
Resume Sessions on git
04:00 PM - 04:15 PM : Tea
04:30 PM - 06:00 PM : FFOS
07:30 PM - 09:00 PM : Dinner
General work-flow and projects in Mozilla ecosystems
By Mick Cooper
( Video Call )
********************************* END FOR TODAY ****************************
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Develper Boot Camp 2014
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10th August 2014
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10:15 AM - 10:30 AM : Break Fast
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM : Finish of GIT
11:30 AM - 11:45 AM : Tea
12:00 AM - 12:30 PM : Hacking a Project
12:30 AM - 01:00 PM : FFOS Hacking ( psbots )
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01:00 PM - 02:00 PM : (: LUNCH :)
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02:00 PM - 03:00 PM : Community Building ( Gautham Raj & Kutty )
03:30 PM - 04:00 PM : Mozilla Style Guides ( Jafar )
04:00 PM - 04:15 PM : Tea
04:30 PM - 05:00 PM : Group Pic & Socialise
************************ END OF BOOTCAMP ****************************
We tried out a couple of different organizing methods during the event that made it a little different, The changes made are mentioned with the reason we believed for the change.
First Try was to move the user engaging sessions post Lunch : This is to ensure that the most energized time during the start is utilized, the excitement will keep the attendees live during the hours before lunch. Keeping the intro section after lunch helps to navigate through the sleepy hours.
I agree this won’t work in all cases, at least when attendees don’t know each other, but this can be a useful change in many cases.
Results: Post Lunch Sessions on Day one and Two were : Introduce yourself and Community Building which was perfect for engaging the attendees. Results were positive.
Mike Cooper [:mythmon], Web Developer, Support Mozilla (SuMo)
Second Try was to merge Remote sessions with other activities, like lunch, Dinner or coffee, this doesn’t mean the activities must be done simultaneously. Merging the sessions with these activities will give some extra push to the participants to complete the tasks.
Note : Do not force the attendees complete lunch, Dinner or coffee in short time at least 40 Mins is to be alloted before planing other activities. This won’t work if the remote sessions involves attendees participation in some kind other than listening.
Results : Time lost with Internet Issues which popped up during the video call had minimal effect on the schedule.
These were a few experimental changes we had with bootcamp.
Metric
Moving on to the agendas of event, we managed to solve all the bug created during the event for demonstrating the Bugzilla work-flow.
Attendees did work on other bugs in Mozilla Ecosystem, will publish the bugs after the post attendee survey.
A total of 10 Pull requests were made by participants on a Mini web portal project BootCamp under the community repository Mozilla Kerala.
Community Building
Community is a fundamental part of our life on the planet, the primary idea of bringing in a Community Building session was to encourage the developers to work as a community than individuals and also to strengthen the Mozilla community.
We did it
Developer Bootcamp 2014 Proved to be an awesome event with fun, excitement, Merges and more, with help of awesome mozillians we were able to complete the goals on paper to reality to a greater extend than we thought of.
Much more happed at Bootcamp 2014, the joy and fun we had could only be experienced in presence, here is a video of what happened during the two short days, it shows more than what can be documented.
I would like to thank all the attendees of Bootcamp for making this a memorable event.
Hoping to see more Developer Bootcamp around the world.
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