djwonk

A DC-area programming group, the Potomac Hackers, is meeting on Wed., March 25 in the DC area. The location will be decided by a vote, please RSVP on the Google Group.

Who are the Potomac Hackers?

We started last year — we were called the Potomac Ruby Hackers back then. To be more inclusive, we dropped the Ruby requirement.  I compiled a few quotes from a previous message board thread.  I think these quotes give us an idea of where we might want to take the group. There is a lot of common ground and some different ideas of things we might try…

• “Programmers should get together and do more than just listen to a presentation — the typical way to organize a user group. They should have a place to experiment on various projects. This is good for us and it is good for the tech community.”
• “…we should avoid a one-to-many, scheduled-presentation style
• affair, but whatever we do should be relatively organic.”
• “…the most effective method for people to organize and share knowledge and trade ideas is to work together one-to-one, pair programming.”
• “at the core it should be about programming together. I would truly love the chance to simply get to watch more and learn as I think it would help mold my programming behavior…”
• “a place to go code where you can be certain that there will be other people coding around you. I don’t think it matters what language they are using.”
• “If the group provides a place for people to meet and a communication mechanism for people to exchange ideas in advance, then that’s all you need.”
• “the intent of the group: – Polyglotism – Learning – Sharing – Community – Beginner and advanced friendly alike – Welcoming (I did host PRH in my backyard a few times with — that was part of the point)”
• “It would be about discussing tech issues — and building consensus to find projects to work on together.”
• “I know we all have our own individual projects that we want to spend time on, but I feel like if we can come up with something to all work on together that as a group we can product something truly meaningful.”
• “I believe that human interactions and group dynamics are sorely under- examined and undervalued in our technical community, and that remedying this could have a great beneficial effect on our collective productivity.”
• “I think many people assume that groups (many-to-many) have to be chaotic, disorderly, and unsatisfying. They don’t.”
• “My vision for PRH is about building a good group dynamic while doing fun programming stuff. I want to do that with a shared understanding that it will be in a consensus fashion, not a “loudest or most dominant voice wins”.”
• “when we get there, the organizer makes any announcements, and then we all take 15 minutes or so to mill about and find people with whom to work on things, and then for the rest of time we do that. Ideally it will continue to be organic, so that you can wander around and see what people are doing during the time.”