As we just started day 2 of WeCamp I’m reflecting back on the first day of the event. As I am being a coach this year, things are very different from last year for me. I’m hoping to have enough time to publish some notes and obversations every day.

Being a coach

Getting a team of random people to coach is an interesting exercise. First thing to do is to actually try and size up all the team members and see what kind of personalities you have in your team, and how each team member can fulfill a role in the team. Additionally, the skillset of your team members can vary greatly. Although randomly created, my team actually has a pretty nice set of skills, including good frontend skills, good backend skills and even some project management skills. After some initial hesitation, the personalities also seem to be able to work together quite nicely.

Being the coach of this team is an interesting experience. On the one hand, I am here to observe my team members so I can advise them in their further (personal) development as well as help them. On the other hand, especially at the start of the event, I am also looked at to take the lead and guide the team into the project. This is an interesting double role, especially since one requires me to not interfere with things while the other actually requires me to play an active role in the team. Trying to combine those two roles is interesting.

Being coached

Luckily after some feedback from last years coaches we decided to actually have someone coach the coaches this year. Because of that I am being coached by Jeremy Coates, who is doing an excellent job of giving us some theoretical background information and helping us with the actual practical work. His support in this process is really valuable.

The project has started

After our initial introduction round and brainstorming, we decided on a project to work on. Some really interesting discussions where held on which project to work on, and during the voting the votes were even shifted from one idea to another. We’ve then brainstormed for as many features as we could think, then narrowed our scope to a scenario that we could realistically finish within the time constraints of WeCamp. That scenario was cut up into a set of user stories as well as two spikes, points we needed to research before starting our actual work and this morning, work has started on bootstrapping the project and getting as much information as possible out of the spikes.

Let’s see what we can do today. I’ll let you know tomorrow.