The first ‘Bristol Hack Night’ took place on October 21st 2014. The hack nights were the idea of, and are run by, Jeff Schomay. Jeff is a JavaScript developer and writer from America who moved to Bristol at the start of 2014. Jeff had previously lived in L.A., where there were several JavaScript hack nights taking place every week, mostly at offices after work hours. He was missing that here, so decided to set one up on his own. He suggested it through our Meetup pages, so I met up with him and as it fit in well with CodeHub we started planning the first hack night, as well as the HTML5 games workshop.

At the hack nights, everybody can just bring anything they want to work on. There is pizza and drinks. At the beginning everybody says what they are planning to work on, so people with shared interests can compare notes or help each other out. The first meetup had 23 participants if I remember right, then there was a stretch with sometimes just over 10 people, but after a while it really picked up and now it is more like 20 people per meetup.

I have not always been able to write much code, some of these hack nights turned more into “chat nights” for me, but there's at least one side project, an advent calender built with Node/Express and ReactJS, that I owe to the hack nights, where people gave me some crucial pointers.

At the time of writing, the hack nights have been running for over 6 months, and are about to relocate from their initial home at the Engine Shed to the offices of Bluespeck Financial/Momentum Financial Technology - who sponsor the hack nights.

I am looking forward to the next half year, when the hack nights will actually take place in daylight!

By Katja
Posted in Categories: hacknight