SitePoint Albania Hackathon #1 (Report)

When I started writing for SitePoint in May 2014 I never suspected it to be much more than an ongoing gig to write technical articles for developers and designers. While that itself was a quite important factor to me (being involved in more technical matters was something I lacked as a community builder involved in technical communities), I became much more involved with the SitePoint community on different levels throughout the years.

Today, the Albanian SitePoint community introduced more than 12 authors, where among half of them are ongoing authors. During the time of the SitePoint Ambassadors program we had a couple of Ambassadors who contributed to various community tasks, including Peer Review (which was a great milestone introduced by the one and only Bruno Skvorc).

Since 2016 we have been holding several meetups, introducing new contributors on ways how to get involved in SitePoint, while still offering a space for existing authors to meet up and spend quality time together face to face.

Since Aleksander Koko and me kickstarted the local community, there has been a total of over 157 articles by contributors from Albania, a considerable amount for such a young country when it comes to tech in general. With OSCAL’15 and OSCAL’16 we also had SitePoint sponsoring the event and we had the chance to meet Bruno Skvorc and Chris Ward, respectively PHP and Mobile Editor of SitePoint.

me with Bruno, Aleksander and Chris during OSCAL’15

To help things grow, we decided to organize a small Hackathon at our local Open Labs Hackerspace, dedicated to everything SitePoint and web technologies. We peer reviewed, registered on the forum and wrote outlines on potential articles which would work on SitePoint well. We also had a look through the process I followed for Open Source Week and what approach we had on themed weeks.

Again, it was great to meet with people in person. It’s also amazing to see the great diversity we have at our local events (if you call 80% women diverse, it’s almost as if men are underrepresented). I hope to bring even more contributors together at the next edition of OSCAL, on May 13 & 14th. Rock on!