Hi Guys,
I'm a Software Engineer primarily working with C# on enterprise backend solutions in the financial industry. Let's put it this way, my job is boring and I spend a LOT of time working on legacy systems and code written many years ago.
I'm desperate to work on more exciting and modern projects, specifically involving UWP but due to my day job and a busy family life I really don't have time to work on personal projects. This got me thinking about starting a kind of "club" to essentially collaborate with other developers in a similar situation as me to work on a UWP app as a fun side project and learning experience.
I'm not interested in the fame and fortune of creating the next SnapChat etc. however, there's no harm in profiting from any app we create should it prove to be successful though it's not really the point of the project!
I also see a lot of threads here relating to people either new to C# and UWP or new to programming with virtually zero experience. This makes me feel that the project could be a great opportunity for some experienced developers to help tutor new developers and pretty much breed a new generation of developers that want to develop for Windows 10! As such I would like to keep the project open to anyone that's interested rather than just people like me that already have the knowledge (or at least some of it) but just don't have the time.
There is a BUT, it would not be good to have a single experienced developer and 20 inexperienced developers working on a single project as things would become unmanageable from the start and I don't think anyone or the project would benefit. So I think there should be limits to ensure there is a small team with a good range of experience, for example 2 senior developers, 2 mid level developers and 2 junior or inexperienced developers. I believe this approach would provide the best chance at knowledge sharing and give the team the ability to actually create a great app.
If the idea of this project has a lot of interest then it would be best to stick with the small team size and create multiple teams that each work on their own project, there would be no problem in knowledge sharing between the teams and perhaps we could encourage some light and healthy competition to keep things interesting.
It would be great to use agile principals but due to the unpredictable time constraints of team members it would be difficult to host scrums daily and also difficult to complete a sprint within a specific time period. As such I would recommend planning sprints to get a good structure but not strictly constraining them to a set time. As the team gets more experienced and gets used to working together then it may be possible to start practising agile fully.
Ok so that's it for now, let me know if you have any interest in this "club" and what experience you have, once there's a few replies we can start discussing what to do next.
Cheers!
Edit 1: New group has been created called "UWP Dev Club" and I've invited the 3 users who answered the poll on this thread. Everyone is welcome to join so either answer the poll, request to join in this thread or head over to the group and click join! http://forums.windowscentral.com/groups/uwp-dev-club.htm
Edit 2: Apparently groups are pretty useless here as I get HTTP 500 errors most of the time when trying to go to the group. @ttsoldier suggested using Slack and while I didn't want to set that up just yet since the group is not going to work out I might as well set it up now, I may also set up a Visual Studio Team Services project as well, will send some info via PM once I get things up and running.
I'm a Software Engineer primarily working with C# on enterprise backend solutions in the financial industry. Let's put it this way, my job is boring and I spend a LOT of time working on legacy systems and code written many years ago.
I'm desperate to work on more exciting and modern projects, specifically involving UWP but due to my day job and a busy family life I really don't have time to work on personal projects. This got me thinking about starting a kind of "club" to essentially collaborate with other developers in a similar situation as me to work on a UWP app as a fun side project and learning experience.
I'm not interested in the fame and fortune of creating the next SnapChat etc. however, there's no harm in profiting from any app we create should it prove to be successful though it's not really the point of the project!
I also see a lot of threads here relating to people either new to C# and UWP or new to programming with virtually zero experience. This makes me feel that the project could be a great opportunity for some experienced developers to help tutor new developers and pretty much breed a new generation of developers that want to develop for Windows 10! As such I would like to keep the project open to anyone that's interested rather than just people like me that already have the knowledge (or at least some of it) but just don't have the time.
There is a BUT, it would not be good to have a single experienced developer and 20 inexperienced developers working on a single project as things would become unmanageable from the start and I don't think anyone or the project would benefit. So I think there should be limits to ensure there is a small team with a good range of experience, for example 2 senior developers, 2 mid level developers and 2 junior or inexperienced developers. I believe this approach would provide the best chance at knowledge sharing and give the team the ability to actually create a great app.
If the idea of this project has a lot of interest then it would be best to stick with the small team size and create multiple teams that each work on their own project, there would be no problem in knowledge sharing between the teams and perhaps we could encourage some light and healthy competition to keep things interesting.
It would be great to use agile principals but due to the unpredictable time constraints of team members it would be difficult to host scrums daily and also difficult to complete a sprint within a specific time period. As such I would recommend planning sprints to get a good structure but not strictly constraining them to a set time. As the team gets more experienced and gets used to working together then it may be possible to start practising agile fully.
Ok so that's it for now, let me know if you have any interest in this "club" and what experience you have, once there's a few replies we can start discussing what to do next.
Cheers!
Edit 1: New group has been created called "UWP Dev Club" and I've invited the 3 users who answered the poll on this thread. Everyone is welcome to join so either answer the poll, request to join in this thread or head over to the group and click join! http://forums.windowscentral.com/groups/uwp-dev-club.htm
Edit 2: Apparently groups are pretty useless here as I get HTTP 500 errors most of the time when trying to go to the group. @ttsoldier suggested using Slack and while I didn't want to set that up just yet since the group is not going to work out I might as well set it up now, I may also set up a Visual Studio Team Services project as well, will send some info via PM once I get things up and running.
Last edited:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram