Dear All, Thank you so much for joining, I’m astonished by the amount of you that got interested. You got the memo, we are building useful software, now here goes the how, when and why.

How?#

Every semester we hold talks and decide on building some piece of software (or decide to extend the development time of the current one if it is not yet feature complete). GitHub is the main hub of our collaboration, there we host our project files and track the feature implementation statuses via Github Issues. I’d want to avoid the overly bureaucratic processes experienced in many software companies where before you even start your coding work, you need to file 10 Jira tickets. Github Issues is the ultimate source of truth, and we use individual issues for tracking progress and discussing the assignments. Furthermore, we make use GitHub Wikis to document project structure, development environment setup prerequisites, guides and certain code quirks. The idea of such organization is largely inspired by No Boilerplate’s video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgV6M1LyfNY which seems to address most of the painpoints I experienced during my work as a software dev.

When?#

You can work on the issues anytime you want. To ensure project’s progress though, we set deadlines which based on the urgency and the amount of co-dependent issues can be extended. You can always abandon your issue early if you believe you cannot finish it in time, or move it to someone else if you have both previously agreed upon it. Don’t have more than one issue assigned to you at once (unless the other is very dependent). Furthermore, I envision co-hacking sessions every Thursday at the Kumpula campus in a designated room with some minor snacks (still in talks with Jeff about the snacks). This in-person participation facilitates easier collaboration and mentorship, but online participation will be available with Jitsi Meet (link to be announced soon). Issue related communication, code choices should be discussed on the aforementioned GitHub Issues, but I’m also thinking of hosting a MatterMost channel for the organization. Discussing things such as errors you are encountering, general guidance etc. as Telegram’s not really a great place for software collaboration due to its more personal nature and its lack of code formatting and limited markdown.

Why?#

We are doing all this for the fun of learning and getting the hands on practice that is oftentimes missing in our BSc course. However, the crucial idea in our journey is the Free and Open Source spirit, making our software free to use, modify and redistribute under copyleft licenses - most prominently GPLv3.

Certain project ideas have already been discussed here, like the voting system project. Potentially we can work on multiple ones at the same time but the current idea that I wanted to go with is the Splitwise alternative - software to track shared bills with friends and/or household. I want to go forward with the project introductory meeting on Monday (official announcement soon, still figuring out the room situation and time).

Our GitHub link is https://github.com/ISDC-Helsinki (ISDC was already taken :/ ). Add your Github handle on hedgedoc so that I can add you: https://hedgedoc.kuchta.dev/4Pz1YErLQsexO-fjfS5hrA?both

Of course there’s still going to be plenty of things to figure out on our way and even this 550-word message doesn’t address everything, but I’ll do my best to establish this community!