Community Software from Scratch: a brief history of Calagator

 

  • It helps to have a reason: Portland needed a central place to find out what fun geeky things were happening.

 

  • Existing software tools didn't really do what the community needed, so various community members discussed building something new.

 

  • But how do you start? Audrey emailed everyone she had ever talked to about needing a local tech calendar and invited them to join a mailing list.

 

  • After a couple of weeks of discussion, the group met up in person to start building a calendar aggregator.

 

  • We copied from a local code sprint group, using index cards, whiteboards, and very short iterations (45 min.) to knock out initial tasks quickly.

 

  • At the end of the first day, we had an application with basic Event and Venue models, and the ability to import hCalendar from Upcoming.

 

  • The group continued to meet every two weeks to continue development.

 

  • As the project progressed, the index cards turned into a bug tracker.

 

  • Pair programming has remained an important tool throughout. New people are able to come in and get up to speed on the project quickly, and prior expertise in Ruby is not required.

 

  • Six months later, we have something that looks like a nearly complete calendar aggregator.


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