UPDATE: I’ve started an agile hardware hangout google group. I figured posting hangout links there would be better for keeping people posted on when/where we get a hangout started. Please join the group if you’re interested in this.
I often have a difficult time differentiating between good ideas and completely stupid ideas. I’ll admit to having had more stupid ideas than good ideas, also that I have no idea where this particular idea will end up. But in the name of friendly collaboration and pulling together the agile hardware community, I’ve decided I’m just going to go for it and see what happens.
At Agile2014, I sat through a talk from Daniel Markham called Distributed Team Technology for Co-Located teams. Daniel introduced a few collaboration tools he’s used in the past, one of which was Google Hangouts as an alternative to Webex and other more business’y solutions. Being part of a distributed team at XtremeEDA, I found Daniel’s advice quite practical because I thought it would be useful for us to share company presentations, lunch-n-learns, etc.
Then I got carried away and started to think about how I could use a Google Hangout to reach out to others in the agile hardware community. Didn’t take long and I figured why not just do everything I do with AgileSoC.com from a google hangout. I already have a semi-regular time set aside on Wednesday nights where I blog, work on SVUnit and do other little projects so why not just open things up to whoever might be wondering by?
And so here I am, blogging from a Google Hangout. Tonight is the first night I’m trying it. I shared the link on my twitter feed with #agile #hardware… which is probably what I’ll do every week. From there, I guess if people are sitting around with nothing better to do, they can come and chat about agile hardware or help, observe and/or heckle me as I go about my business. Part of me thinks maybe people will drop by once in a while to say hi or see what’s going on (this would be the good idea scenario). Another part of me thinks no one will care and it’ll just be me hanging out with myself (this would be the completely stupid scenario).
We’ll see what happens. It’s been 31 minutes so far and I’m the first and only person here. Hopefully that’s not a sign.
To be continued… every Wednesday evening around 8pm PST/11pm EST until further notice.
-neil
Hi Neil, I’ve been following you since hearing about your agile hardware demo at Agile 2014.
I think this is a great idea, and I hope to make it to future hangouts, I didn’t hear about this one until now because I was asleep (I’m in ADT) but I’ll brew some coffee and try to stay up for the next one. I’d love to talk more about these ideas and how I can get started.
Hope to see you next week.
matt, this is great. maybe I was wrong when I thought this could be a completely terrible idea :). reminds me that I’m on vacation next week so I’m a 50/50 chance of going again next wed. but the following wed is a for sure. I’ll figure out some way of publishing a link to take the guess work out of it.
-neil
Occurred to me that twitter is probably not the best place to post hangout links. Any suggestions on where we could post them? Maybe start a google group to get an email when we start? other suggestions?
Neal, yeah, a Google+ community/event might be good if you can manage yet another platform. And maybe cross-post to the Agile+ community. Plus a reminder here on AgileSoC and in the LinkedIn group the morning-of might be handy too. (Un)Fortunately, Twitter is the one platform I’ve resisted thus far.
fyi… started an agile hardware google group for posting hangout links. we’ll see if that works as a rallying point.
-neil