On Tuesday 23rd January we had our first Ladies of Code Glasgow meetup of the year. This month session was something we hadn’t done before: Lean Coffee. I have attended other local meetups in this format and I think it’s a great way to let everyone have their voice heard… and as a meetup organiser it takes the pressure off finding a speaker!
Basically, the members of the meetup define the agenda. We had post its, pens and a board. After people suggested their topics, we voted for the topics we wanted to talk about then we created a “todo” list prioritised by the number of votes. We spoke about each topic for 5 minutes (ish) then voted how we were feeling: did we want to keep talking for a few more minutes or move on to another topic?
We had some interesting topics on the board and a great group of attendees willing to join in the conversations. With a mix of experienced devs, students, devops, testers and designers it was an interesting mix that could contribute to the topics from a variety of viewpoints.
Our topics for lean coffee
A few of the topics fell in to the category of "experience", how do we learn and get experience in a technology? Also, interestingly, how do we define experience? Some people may say they have experience after a simple "hello world" tutorial, whilst others wouldn't say they had experience, despite having code in production!
I also liked hearing how teams are structured at different organisations and we also had a discussion around team dynamics- making sure a team is built up of the right mix of people. This is something I find really interesting and think could make a whole session rather than 5 minutes!
Thanks to everyone who came along, I think the format worked really well and would like to try it out again soon. Our next meetup will be late February, keep an eye on the meetup group for announcements.