Carol Minton Morris, Ben O’Steen, and David Flanders In a call to “keep it real” the 1977 Doobie Brothers’ hit song “Takin it to the Streets” contains the words, “You, telling me the things you’re gonna do for me; I aint blind and I dont like what I think I see.” Developer Happiness Days (DEV8D) organizers David Flanders and Ben O’Stein borrowed a bit of that spirit to take intense and often useful hallway conversations from around the fringes of larger tech-and-info-culture conferences (where they feel that they are ignored) to make them the centerpiece of an unconference event aptly named Developer Happiness Days. The goal for the meeting held in London Feb. 8-12, 2009 was to keep it real, lively, relevant and most importantly fun–for technology developers.

At work and play at DEV8D. Photo courtesy of Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager, University of Huddersfield, UK, and Bryony Ramsden.

The idea of happiness as the basis for a technical gathering is nothing to laugh at. The 2006 global map of “Subjective Well-being” by Adrian White, University of Leicester, suggests that there are a lot of people out there, technically oriented and otherwise, who could use some cheering up. While we might be able to name a few things that please us, general happiness is often regarded as an illusive, hard-to-measure quality that tends to be something we recognize, fleetingly, when we experience it.

Flanders and O’Steen came up with methods that put developers and their ideas first to increase feelings of well-being. O’Steen suggests in his blog, “A good innovative developer is creativity and a pragmatic attitude; someone with the ‘rough consensus, running code‘ mentality that pervades good software innovation.” DEV8D was all about fostering “play, vagueness and communication” by putting unlikely concepts and people together to create surprise and inspiration. They even considered the “usual suspect-type” of developer who might be shy about sharing ideas and personal information in a face-to-face, social-work environment. O’Steen continues, “There is a need to provide means for people to break the ice, and to strike up conversations with people that they can recognize as being of like minds.” He suggest that simple feedback loops such as being thanked for even small contributions can lead to increased communication and agreement in technical development processes.

The developers who participated spoke and wrote eloquently about what they learned (see related posts below). They managed their time at this carefully designed event to enable hands-on learning about rapid prototyping tools such as Python and Django, while also trying them out in a technical community. Lively question and answer sessions where participants agreed to the rule, “what is said in the room, stays in the room” promoted honest information exchanges.

A few successful techniques balanced play with free time, useful activities and leveraging lightweight Web 2.o technologies. Noting that everyone likes to get a high scores whether in video games or in social network sites, O’Steen used a service created by Sam Easterby-Smith on day two of the conference to collect metrics via twitter and provide feedback to participants (“Happyness-o-meter”). Wordle was used to create a word cloud snapshots of each attendee’s web space as an abstract way of sharing information. Other easy-going game-like activities helped to keep people engaged and interested. Some DEV8D events were held in local pubs on the outside chance that people might relax in these types of informal settings.

By the second day DEV8D evolved into a build-your-own-experience that consisted of an all-hands “base camp” where developers came and went, hung out, worked on problems collaboratively and reflected on evolving perceptions. A series of “lightning talks” on a variety of short topics encouraged attendees to only attend those sessions that were of particular interest while leaving open the possibility of mixing and matching.

The main event was a ‘Developer Decathlon’ competition where attendees  assembled into nine teams and were encouraged to make something useful and creative in exchange for a chance to win cash prizes. The jury is still out on who will take home the cash prize so stay tuned to DEV8D to find out what went on.

DEV8D on the Web:

DEV8D JISC blog: http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/ Read posts from the event about collective intelligence and how technology can help to access it, a five minute interview with Ross Gardler, Apache, Mark Dewey’s semantic search idea, more rapid ideas,  a video of Peter Sefton’s lightning talk about focusing on something simple like making PDF documents more usable, all about “uber users” and several others.

Google Code DEV8D Web site: http://code.google.com/p/developerhappinessdays/

Aridadne article by Julian Cheal: dev8D: JISC Developer Happiness Days http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue58/jisc-dev8d-rpt/

Ben O’Steen blog post: Developer Happiness days - Why happyness is important  http://oxfordrepo.blogspot.com/2009/02/developer-happiness-days-why-happyness.html

JISC Developer Happiness Days by Julliette Culver: http://www.jvvw.com/?p=292