I was able to volunteer for Hack the Gap 2019, January 26th-27th, and it was amazing. I can’t imagine how much work it is to put on an event like this and it went as smoothly as I could have imagined. I applaud all of the organizers for putting in so much time and effort to make this work. I personally did very little. I saw a tweet go out a few weeks prior to the event asking for volunteers and mentors and I signed up to help.

Initially I had a morning shift that was just 3 hours volunteering, but I asked for another shift to allow for time to mentor participants. On Saturday morning I was doing my best to greet people on the way into the building, “Hello, good morning! You can sign in at the desk and then take the elevator up to floor 5.” After my greeting duties I spent time helping the breakfast and coffee vendors bring everything up to the event floor and work with several others to setup breakfast for all of the participants. After breakfast setup, I waited to make sure all of the participants had been through the line before getting breakfast for myself and sitting down for introductions and announcements.

Introductions and announcements led to raffles for prizes including books, memberships to coworking spaces, and tickets to a Dessa concert. After intros and raffles the organizers led into forming teams for hacking on projects. The team formation format was similar to the ‘Open Spaces’ format that I’ve participated in at DevOpsDays conferences, however ‘Open Spaces’ is focused on discussion and not hacking. Participants formed a line, and had 30 seconds to pitch the project that they wanted to work on with other people. Then there was a round of people showing interest in the different projects to filter out projects that wouldn’t have enough people or wouldn’t have a team with diverse skillsets to be able to build something in two days of work. The projects that had enough interest and a team with diverse skillsets formed up, were assigned an area for working together, and got to hacking. I was scheduled to volunteer Saturday morning from 7am to 10am, and it was about 10:15am when teams were getting settled into their areas. I left from my morning shift to spend some time at home.

In the afternoon, I came back for my mentoring shift from 5pm to 10pm on Saturday. There was dinner shortly after I showed up, and I introduced myself to the other mentors and volunteers that were helping out on Saturday night. From the perspective of a mentor, things mostly ran themselves on Saturday night and the teams were mostly self-sufficient. The most common problems were teams having issues with Git force pushes, JavaScript syntax, and installing Node.js projects on Windows. I was able to help with about 4-5 small problems while I was there, which may not seem like a lot, but it speaks to the ability of the participants to work together to solve problems as a team.

At 10pm I was exhausted and it was time for me to leave. I was busy on Sunday so I didn’t get to attend the demos in person, but I saw plenty of posts online and the projects looked great. My congratulations go out to the all of the participants. I had a lot of fun meeting everyone and getting to help out in a small way and I would volunteer more of my time next year.