Those unfamiliar with the foreign coding languages of Javascript or HTML can participate in the coding Hack Nights at Athensworks.
Athensworks is a coworking space, somewhere people with different employers or who are self employed can come use provided equipment and consult with others. Athensworks offers an assortment of memberships which workers can pay for monthly. It also hosts several events at different times throughout the month.
Ricky Chilcott is a member of Athensworks and the co-founder of a web application development company called Rackfire. He said the founders of Athensworks, Ben Lachman and two others, believed their goal was to be “part of a larger organization that is trying to make Athens a better place to run businesses more entrepreneurially minded and kind of invest back in the community.”
Athensworks hosts several events during the month — the next is the September Hack Night. Athensworks’ Hack Night event welcomes non-members and involves a group of people working on a certain project — software, hardware or information projects — for that night, but projects sometimes span over multiple Hack Nights.
“Even people who don’t know anything about programming or what goes into making an app or some sort of online service can contribute quite a lot to the discussion leading up to [the technical bits],” Michael Blohm, an Athensworks member who works on application and web development, said.
Blohm said these people are better at picking out the simpler features a product should have and noticing the certain problems they could run into, as the novice participants think more like a normal user would.
Blohm said the usual presence he sees ranges from five to 12 contributors. Participation from people who cannot code well usually happens during the first segment of the evening.
Athensworks members share all of the code or any other work from one of their Hack Nights on GitHub, a website for developers to share code for free.
“We encourage others around the world to either look at it, contribute to it [or] make it better,” Chilcott said.
Among the programs created in the Hack Nights is the Ohio Brew Week app. The group constructed the app so it would give a listing of the beers, where they are served and allowed feedback for which bars had certain brews out of stock.
“No matter what [project] you pick, it’s going to involve learning for most people,” Chilcott said.
For most Hack Nights, one of the Athensworks members leads the program. Blohm has conducted many of these Hack Night events. The leader’s tasks mostly involve basic preparation for the coming night, such as unlocking the building, ensuring the food arrives in time and facilitating introductions.
After the first portion of the evening, Blohm said Hack Nights are “pretty hands free.” Often, they will try to arrive at the meetings with set ideas for new projects for the participants to work on in case no one else has a fresh idea. They also choose what technology will be used and give people duties that interest them. Throughout the whole event, the Hack Night leader is supposed to “[ensure] the scope of the project is manageable and that everyone is benefiting,” Blohm said.
Sometimes specific Hack Nights will be set aside for bigger projects over time. However, participants usually decide on a project that night of the hack, but Blohm said not all Hack Nights result in a tangible product.
“Most of (the projects) have been one-off things that explore an idea more than they end up being a final product that people are actually using,” Blohm said.
