Last night, the little geek in me decided to ditch the iMac and battle the elements (aka finding a parking spot in the city) to attend my first ever web developer Meetup.

Our group has actually dedicated a website, www.brisbanewebdesign.org. It was held at the Brisbane library, in the community room.
I didn’t quite know what to expect, but I did think that the discussion was going to be rather technological and not focused on running a web business itself. And I was so wrong!

Project planning for web developers

Ben Maden, from MatterSolutions.com.au, is an e-business architect, planner, however you want to call it. He is very experienced and knowledgeable not only in web coding but also in planning, organising and delivering projects on time. So he decided to get us to start the year with a little bit of planning. And don’t think planning as in “yeah right, I know how to write a to-do list”… Engineering planning. Think Critical Path, Earliest start, Earliest finish.

It followed by a discussion on how to best manage a (local or remote) team of web developers and contractors, using online tools such but also techniques such as “Scrum”. Agile was mentioned, I kept my mouth shut and made sure I asked what the heck that was at the bar a tad later…I think he will post the video shortly on www.brisbanewebdesign.org

Why attend meetups

That's right, nowadays Google is our best friend, we don’t really need to “see” anyone in person to get what we want. But I want to interact with my own local community - finding some “Brisbane” blood is actually quite nice and refreshing. Being able to bounce ideas off each other, in the same room, without having your phone ringing and mail popping out unread emails every minute. Moreover, this meet up wasn’t industry (tourism) specific - it forced me out of my comfort zone, and allowed me to draw parallels with a couple of other industries and knick some of their strategies!

It was decided that each next session would be in the format of a presentation followed by an open forum to address a challenge one (or a few of us) related to the topic. Click the first link in this post to be redirected!

All in all, what I got out of it: