Post-hackathon, what's next for Dev/Iowa? A chat with Zach Sanderson

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The first-ever Dev/Iowa Hackathon came to downtown Iowa City this weekend, bringing hardware hacks, projects for all ages and metaphorical mountains of code to the Ped Mall. The whir of a 3D printer and occasional clatter of a racing Sphero punctuated the weekend.

Around 100 people stopped by to build, mentor or observe - not counting several who wandered in thinking that 136 S. Dubuque St.was still a cafe.

The hackathon was open to all skill levels, and emphasized trying new things. Some said the fear of just getting started can be a barrier to learning tech skills.

“I was kind of nervous picking up a Raspberry Pi for the first time, but it was a great experience just to see what these devices can do," said Adam Engel, one of the staffers at UI Partners. “It took a little bit for me to get over that hurdle this weekend, but now that I have there's a couple more wheels turning of projects I can start."

In the midst of the hackathon, we sat down with Dev/Iowa coordinator (and long-time friend to We Create Here) Zach Sanderson about what's next for the UI's tech training arm, lessons learned and his vision for a true home for tech in Iowa City.

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You've been in customer discovery mode – what's the biggest thing you've learned? 

“I think one of the biggest things I set out to learn is who everybody is – and that will be an ongoing process. My hypothesis was, we have a strong developer community, and I've witnessed that through existing meetups and things like that, but I believed there was even more out there, and I also believed that that there were other folks who are interested in becoming part of the tech community.

“I think there's untapped potential, and that existing potential is out there, and often I think organized, but not everybody is all together. And I've been working with the existing meetups on that too.”

So is that the role of Dev/Iowa, to bring all the pieces together?

“For me, one of the things with the existing community is to reduce friction for them. With those groups, they're run by a few passionate people, but your passion can slowly get sapped if you have to do all the food, and sponsors, and speakers, and things like that. I feel like that's my role. People who are passionate enough, and know enough about tech, they should be working on sharing their knowledge, not where they're going to hold their next meetup.”

Based on that - why a hackathon?

“Joe Seeley came to me, early on, when I was introducing myself to people, Joe said ‘I'd like to see us have a hackathon.' Having that first developer give that validation to me, I was like, ‘that's enough, let's run with it.' And he's here today, he's been working all weekend, pair programming with two kids.

"At that point, I was only really about a month in, and I wasn't sure really what the end goal was with a hackathon. But I realized it would be very good kind of thing to rally around. I don't want to say kickoff, because people way before me have been doing cool stuff.

“One of the other divides that's there, that really shouldn't be, is the university to public divide. So one of our students, a grad student, is a social events coordinator. He was telling me, he didn't know what Dev/Iowa was, he didn't know what was out there, he'd never been to meetups, but he's a social events coordinator for this group, and he's saying ‘we need to have more.' And you go to the people who are having meetups, and they say the same thing, ‘we need to get more students here.'"

What are your biggest lessons learned from this weekend, what are your takeaways?

“One of the things it's proven to me is, more frequent events, obviously not of this size, but I've had a lot of people say, ‘We should do this more regularly, this should just be something we should just do, it doesn't need to be fanfare,' things like that. I've met several people I don't know, and they're like ‘yeah, when can we do this again?'

"One of the really interesting parts was the hardware – we've never worked on the hardware before, and to see people kind of launch into that – I think that's a place where we can step up and say, ‘we've got some hardware for you to play with.' A lot of times it takes some money for the hardware, which isn't very expensive, but also it takes the context, to give people some ideas of what it can do.”

With that in mind, what's in the future for Dev/Iowa?

“We'll have our summer bootcamp – after the hackathon, this next month is heavy recruiting for that. I can see us supporting existing meetups, supporting other evetns, student events, really just increasing social aspects for developers. And we'll continue to do workshops [There's an intermediate Java course coming in early May], courses, stuff like that.

“Then we'll look at having a space to make those things easier, to hold events.”

Tell me more about the bootcamp?

“It's still a nine week bootcamp in the summer, June and July. In the past it's been project based, but this year will be even more project based. I want people coming in with an end goal in mind. They'll learn front end and back end web tools to get to that goal, but everyone will have a diffrerent path to get through those nine weeks. It will be led by Steve Davis – Bio::Neos is his company.

“There's a broad scale of experience in the community – so one of the reasons I wanted to have an open hackathon is to focus on the confidence aspect for people. You can have people who really know a lot and downplay their skills, so people coming in, I didn't want them to be afraid and just assume that everyone else knows more than them…So I think, with the bootcamp, it allows some of those people, who are more beginners, to gain some confidence, get to know some people in an environment where they're there because they're learning.”

You mentioned a space...

“We are trying to come up with some space. We want, obviously, a spot for the bootcamp, but also just for people to more easily flip the light switch on and be ready to run. But we don't have anything laid out yet.

"It'd be a tech hub, for lack of a better word. Meetups could come there, anything that's technical, courses and workshops, student groups, things like that."

So how would that be similar or different to coworking spaces?

“It will be a little more focused on event space, a little larger – give the technical people who have projects, and different pursuits that aren't necessarily businesses, but giving the technical person a spot to work on projects, meet together, things like that."

What can the community help you with? 

“I think getting the word out – especialy for people with tech inclinations. We don't have an age limit, we support CoderDojo, we've got high school kids here working on projects – they're teaching me stuff.

“The other side is the employer side of things – getting the word out to potential employers, potential sponsors of events that we run. “It's never been a hard conversation to have with employers, they realize the importance of growing the tech community in the area.”