By Amanda Baker published on

Stop Starting, Start Finishing.

Does Wellington need another tech meetup? Probably not. But we started one anyway.

“Stop Starting, Start Finishing” is a meetup for developers and testers working for government. So far there are around 12 attendees and even though we are from different organisations we all working with same framework (Silverstripe) on the same infrastructure (the Common Web Platform or CWP).

Sounds exciting, right? Wrong.

The reality is that we spent the first meetup talking about team processes, the development pipeline (workflow) and communication. Because what we agreed early on is that you will struggle to get anything into production if your work processes and team communication are not working well.

In the second meetup we spoke about code versioning, and peer review processes. Both vital to how we work as teams. We just finished our third meetup where we covered a range of topics including the following:

  • The all of government design system – a project currently in the research / prototype stage

  • Serving machine-readable metadata to Google, which in turn will enrich the search results for our users

  • How some of us  stopped using CWP email server and instead use Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) – following some interesting advice from a security team

  • And how and why we automated our test suite and set it up to run every time there is a code change to the project repository.

But wait, shouldn’t a tech meetup discuss things like VR, AI, blockchain and drones?

Hmmmm. In this meetup we focus on the technology that doesn’t get much hype but that is taken for granted and used every day (search, email, common user interface components).

Topics we look to cover at future events are:

A benefit of this meetup is that someone can pass on what was learned on a particular project to another team that might need need to do the same work in a few months time.

Do you work in a Government department developing websites?

If you would like to find out more or get involved in the meetup, we’re keen to hear from you. Our email address is info@digital.govt.nz.

Government Information Services (GIS) is a team within Department of Internal Affairs that develops and delivers digital products such as www.Govt.nz, www.Gazette.govt.nz, www.Digital.govt.nz and www.Data.govt.nz. GIS also oversee a series of standards and advice including the digital design standard, web accessibility and usability standards and advice on writing for the web.  

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