Dojo community day Switzerland

We recently hosted a Dojo Community Day in Brugg, Switzerland on the Saturday following a week of Dojo workshops. We had about 25 Dojo users and committers join us from England, France, Netherlands, Germany, Romania, Austria, and Switzerland for a fun day of hacking and discussions about current and future directions of Dojo.

We began the day by welcoming the group at the modern university in Brugg/Windisch and, thanks to SitePen, we had Dojo t-shirts and stickers for everyone. After some initial time to socialize and get everyone situated with wifi, I delivered a short talk on the current state of Dojo, and answered questions about the direction of Dojo. We discussed the idea that getting to Dojo 2 would mean completing the packages incrementally that we need, making them work with today’s Dojo 1.x core so people can start adopting them as they are ready, and then calling that Dojo 2 when they are all completed. For example, Intern and dstore are big parts of the Dojo 2 roadmap.

After my talk, Patrick Ruzand of IBM gave a short overview of recent changes to Dojo Mobile in 1.10, and answered a few questions about Delite/Deliteful, IBM’s early work on Dijit 2.0.

The purpose of the community day was then a mix of hacking and chatting. We split the room into groups based on interest, with the categories chosen as fixing bugs in 1.x, getting involved with Delite/Deliteful, and fixing documentation and tests. We landed a few pull requests from the day and closed some bugs. More importantly, we hopefully have encouraged more people to get involved and helped them understand the process a bit better.

Around lunch time, we walked to the Havanna restaurant near the river that agreed to provide wifi and a space to hack for the afternoon. We enjoyed Swiss/German food such as wienerschnitzel, while others enjoyed the Swiss take on Mexican food like fajitas and tacos. We continued talking about may different Dojo topics, and then spent a few more hours hacking on Dojo.

The main challenge with days like this is that there is never enough time. It was great meeting so many Dojo users, and catching up with several Dojo committers. We hope to run similar events later this year after other SitePen Dojo workshops.