It was the last of the English warm summer days, Saturday, 14th September, was the return of the 5th annual codebar unconference! Globally, codebar runs over 150 programming workshops a year and this is only possible through the dedication of its coaches, organisers, and students. The annual unconference, uncodebar, is an all day open space event where every participants gets the opportunity to come together to learn from each other through workshops, demos, lightning talks, discussions and to celebrate the codebar community.
😁 Uncodebar 5, the 2019 edition, was again hosted at Twitter UK, London, that along with GitHub, have supported the event this year and helped make it happen, bringing together over 100 attendees! I will also take a moment to share the #ScottishTwitter initiative that I randomly bumped into while in the common room, it is so funny and brilliant and you could have visited it in Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival! For more info, you can learn more on #ScottishTwitter.
During the day, being an unconference, the schedule is really flexible and free form. We had a pitch session in the morning, with over 20 sessions happening in the different rooms and all of them unknown to participants before the day! The food, facilities and sessions were all really good, and there was a very diverse attendee base! The venue worked really well, as with the previous uncodebars at Twitter UK, they had a main common room where we had the joint sessions, then they had separate breakout rooms for the individual ones and discussions and it worked really well!
What is an unconference, you ask? An open space event, its schedule is created from the sessions participants propose to run on the day. Session pitching is done in the morning, after breakfast and coffee, and a schedule of the unconference is created. The awesome codebar community proposed many great sessions, with topics as diverse as: programming languages, failing sharing circle, getting an internship, GitHub pages, unity, unicorns 🎠, git, Italian food 🇮🇹, cryptography, hackathons, designing for users, and more!😁
It all then wrapped up with a series of lightning talks! Lightning talks on 3D lighting on drawings, Italian pasta and advanced git!Some of the event highlights 🌠: -Really diverse attendance and range of topics discussed -Really friendly and inclusive atmosphere, it was great to have people from so many codebar chapters being able to attend -The whole format was quite exciting as unconferences are less planned and more open this way enabling attendees to make some great connections -We had a slack channel for collaboration, announcements, community memory which is great for this kind of events! -The venue, food and drinks were amazing ☕️ 🍩
Everyone loved the event, it was a great day for the codebar community, from the relaxed conference format, to the inclusive nature and diversity of attendees but also the connections and topics covered! A big thank you to TwitterUK and GitHub for their support and being our sponsors and to our amazing coaches and students for making it a successful event!
//All views are my own