April Meetups: 105 guests, 48 seltzers, 45 All Day IPAs, 19 pizzas & 2 great speakers.
On April 20, we hosted the NYC Scrum User Group for the third time in 2017. Rob Purdie, founder of the group and Agile Coach at IBM, gave an update on IBM’s Agile Transformation. The talk repeatedly returned to the theme of ensuring your team is “doing the right work”, warning the room of agilists that becoming very efficient at doing work that doesn’t matter is the fastest way to get nowhere. It reminded me of a quote written on the wall of our office: “Our greatest fear should not be failure, but of succeeding in life at things that don’t really matter.” While every NYC SUG Meetup has been great, this one stood out for its accessibility and high levels of audience engagement.
A few days later we hosted Li Haoyi (pictured above) who gave a great talk on ‘Designing Open Source Libraries’ at our NY Scala University Meetup. He focused on intuitiveness, layering and documentation as the three keys to creating an open-source library that will keep engineers happy and drive engagement. Haoyi, the author of many popular libraries and fresh off a talk at Scala Days, drew the biggest turnout yet to our new Lower Manhattan HQ. We had to order more pizza 10 minutes after we opened the doors! His honest insights and great delivery also set a record for laughs.
Looking Ahead
Here are some of the tech events on our calendar in May. Hope to see you there!
- May 1 - Dana Pylayeva, HBC Digital’s Agile Coach, is organizing Big Apple Scrum Day, a one day community conference focused on Scrum/Agile principles and practices. This 2017 theme is Always Keep Growing.
- May 6-7 - We’re sponsoring !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”), “two days of ten-minute talks (with lots of breaks, of course!) to celebrate the joyous, exciting, and surprising moments in computing”.
- May 10 - Evan Maloney, Distinguished Engineer at HBC Digital, will be speaking at the Brooklyn Swift Developers Meetup at Work & Co in DUMBO. His talk will trace through the evolution of our project structure and development workflow to arrive at where we are today: a codebase that’s about halfway through a transition to Swift. Some folks from our mobile team will be visiting from Dublin for this one!
- May 11 - Petr Zapletal of Cake Solutions will deliver a talk on how to avoid common pitfalls when designing reactive applications at our NY Scala University Meetup.
- May 24 - Demo Day for our ScriptEd class - a group of high school students who have been learning web development from HBC Digital engineers in our offices every week since September.
- May 25 - NYC PostgreSQL User Group Meetup - details coming shortly.
- May 26 - Summer Fridays start!