On Saturday 5th August 2017 I went to one meetup called "West London Coders" and it was amazing time spent with nice people with similar interest. Here is the link to their meetup page: https://www.meetup.com/West-London-Coders/ I just came across their meetup accidentally and I thought why not attend this tech meetup. Usually on Saturdays I spend time at home with family but I decided to go their and to be honest I was surprised by the event. I usually don't go the meetups now or very rarely but this time I felt good afterwards.
The whole idea of this meetup is to gather in a room and decide the topics that you want to learn around various programming languages. For this meetup there were I think more than 30 people who came. The venue for the meetup was "Net a Porter" office. I never heard about their company. Basically it is a fashion brand with around 5000 employees. Their office is in Westfield shopping complex on the top floor and their office is huge and amazing.
After initial round of introductions the group was divided into 3 separate groups for Front end, Swift and one more group. I chose to go in the Swift group. There were 6 people in the Swift room and we decided to develop an app for their website: www.westlondoncoders.com
The total time for this hackathon was 4.5 hours and we started the actual coding after 1 hours so we were left with 3.5 hours. We ended up creating a simple app with WebView to begin with as the website is responsive but of course in future the plan is to create a native app with connectivity to the website as well and for that the API also needs to be enabled on the site. In those 3.5 hours we mostly spent time understanding the fundamentals of iPhone development and learning about very technical topics like Weak References in Swift and few other topics. There were people with different experience levels but most of us had developed an app in the past, I guess 5 of us so it was a bit smooth.
I really liked the idea of this meetup. Lot of learning that day for me and in the end I felt really really satisfied. Looking forward to more of their meetups in future.
Here is the link to the GitHub Repository: https://github.com/WestLondonCoders/WLC-iOS-App
BTW I came to know that "Net a Porter" also uses JIRA and Atlassian tools in the company. Always good to know that :)