Using GitHub to plan and organise Coffee & Coding

GitHub

learning

Author

YiWen Hon

Published

November 12, 2024

Coffee & Coding

Coffee & Coding is a fortnightly hour-long session organised by the Data Science team, open to all members of the Strategy Unit with an interest in coding. It’s been well received and is a valued source of professional development and general geekery in the team.

We’ve been experimenting with using GitHub as an organisational tool for our team’s work, and are testing the same approach for Coffee & Coding sessions as well. Previously, future Coffee & Coding sessions were haphazardly listed in a Google Doc that was only accessible to members of the Data Science team, and we wanted a more open approach. We also didn’t have a good record of topics that were previously covered.

You’ll need a GitHub account to enjoy the full functionality of the planner. If you need help setting this up, get in touch with any member of the Data Science team.

Any feedback on this new system for organising and planning Coffee & Coding is very welcome! Hope you enjoy using it.

Viewing upcoming sessions

We have created a fully open GitHub project for tracking Coffee & Coding sessions. Any sessions with scheduled dates can be seen in the “Upcoming sessions” view. Clicking on a session title brings up more information, including a brief overview of the session and the people running it. Users with GitHub accounts can make comments or post emoji reactions.

A short clip showing a person clicking on an upcoming session title. A pop up box appears with more information — Viewing upcoming session details

Adding session ideas

To add a session idea:

Create a new issue on the data_science repository. Provide a useful title and description for the session.
Give your new issue the label C&C☕
If you would like to run or contribute to the session, assign yourself to it.
Click “Create” to save your session idea as a GitHub issue. You should then be able to see it listed as a “Potential session” on the planner, and others will be able to view, vote for, and comment on your session idea.

A short clip showing a person creating a new session idea as a GitHub issue, and giving it a title, description, and label — Adding a session idea

Voting for session ideas

We will use thumbs up (👍) emoji reactions to suggested sessions as a voting system to help us with planning and scheduling.

If you see any potential sessions that you are interested in, react to them with a thumbs up emoji. You can see all planned sessions, in order of votes received, listed here.