Events galore!

As you all know I recently went to a Hackathon! Since then there's been a whole slew of cool events, namely the Hackademy for front-end design and a talk at Surrey University on various hot topics.

Hackademy

If you follow IBM and their various promotional campaigns, you might've seen some hashtags such as IBMPlacements. Recently you might have seen IBMHackademy, it only started back in February so it's still pretty fresh.

It's a program set up by Damon Deaner, the head of Front-End development programs at IBM. The Hackademy is a week-long session focused on modern front-end development tools and best practices, it's for front-end devs in IBM from both design and engineering backgrounds and brings everyone together to share ideas, best practices and anything else front-end design!

What does one do in the Hackademy?

It starts with a day and a half conference that covers design thinking, Git, Accessibility, Architecture, Task Runners, CSS preprocessing, Responsive design, Pattern libraries and more! The latter half of the second day is spent in workshops on Sass, Git and Javascript.

For the rest of the week we get to use a Node stack complete with Continuous integration and deployment, to develop and launch a minimum viable product of our group's idea utilizing everything we've learned throughout the week! The emphasis for these projects are:

• Performance
• Accessibility
• Design
• Vanilla Javascript (for the practice!)

Each group then does a small presentation for their project, going through what was built and the whys and hows of the whole thing.

How big are these Hackademies?

Each Hackademy takes around 40 front-end developers, give or take a few.. The original plan only had 2 Hackademies booked, it managed to get to 4 before getting rolled out even further and going transatlantic!

The Hackademy started in Austin Texas and is now hitting Hursley labs all the way over here in the UK! There are around 14 Hackademy sessions planned out in total, that gives this program a reach of roughly 560! I will be interested to see just how far spanning that reach is too, maybe we'll find out.

I'll most likely write another post about the Hackademy once I've finished it (expect something around the 2nd-3rd of April!), and another post for the talk I'll be attending at Surrey University on the 14th April.

See you all soon for some news on my trip to Japan!