Our group had to get together. There were no ands, ifs, or buts about it. The back and forth between the computers was only getting us so far. All of the clarity and vision were being lost in emails and Slack messages. There was a dire need for the success of our final project to engage in the physical realm. I am not sure I even went through all my personalities to get the okay before I was telling my mate that people were coming over to the house. I sent the invite out over the wire not really expecting anyone to take me up on the offer. The library was just not going to give us the bandwidth we needed to support all our little Macs, nor give us the privacy we needed to say all the cuss words that the project had created that lingered on the tips of our tounges.
I live in a frat house. This is not my house anymore. It has been overran by a hoard of five teenagers, six if you count my mate, but at the age of 53, I think he’s reached the optimal level of maturity that he’s going to aspire to. I had to raise my voice over the guitars and amps. “I’m having people over tomorrow…” They have never heard me say that in my life. And just like that, I had an army to start cleaning. That’s really all it took for them to pick up the clothes off the bathroom floor and drop them in a basket. I was a bit taken aback, like they will do that for other people to come over, but you can’t do it on a daily basis? I realize this is a working progress, and I was so grateful for the support of my little soldiers. I went and picked up orange juice and donuts the night before, and the kids even helped out there too by not devouring them as soon as they came out of the grocery bag.
10 am rolled around and Emily, our project manager was the first to show. I was so super excited to see my classmates. All the social sickness and anxiety was moot point in the face of getting to hug my friends. All my confusion and frustration from working solo the last few days melted away as we set up the computers. The energy in my home became thick with the clicky clack of inspiration and breakthrough. We got the UX team up and they patiently went through each element on the wireframes. As lead development, and with my fledging experience, I was in tears explaining how we can’t give them what they wanted, and then Mary’s quiet voice would come from my left, clickity clack clack…”There’s a way we can do that…”. “Never mind, Ux, we can do that.” It felt so good to finally say that. It was magic watching Mary make the changes and manipulate our site. It felt so good to finally not be alone, surrounded by great minds. We united against the clients in one collective conclusion about it all. The clients are messing with us at this point. I stood my ground. I am not putting the newsletter under the footer. No. We will not have a roaming logo throughout our page. No. The logo stays in the header. This process was too much fun. Way way too much fun. 2 pm came so fast. There wasn’t enough sand on the beach for the hourglass.
This meetup was so much more special than the previous one I had attended organized by other techie groups at the bar. There was work, there was engagement. The meetups at the restaurants and bars, no one brings out their laptops. I felt the collaboration and brainstorming, the clicky clack of the keys made me forget we were even on the clock. I never once looked at the time wondering when I was going to be able to escape the social situation. This experience actually has given me a great idea of setting up a weekly or biweekly meetup for my codetalk sisters. Yes, I aim to become a social butterfly. At the time of this blog, there is only five days left of our front-end web development journey. Even though they have only been in my life a short sweet sixteen weeks, at this point, I can’t imagine these ladies not in my day from 9 am to 1 pm. These are the smartest, most driven women I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
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