Hi everyone!

My name is Volodya Grinenko, I live in Simferopol, I am the head of the BEM Development service, I write code 24/7, love my wife and don't like meat. You can find lots of my BEM talks at this link.

It's now my turn to share my thoughts and impressions of the BEM hackathon that we held last November in Moscow.

I'm not one to wax lyrical, but our "first outing" has left some fond memories, not least of the great turnout, with people from different cities coming to spend a weekend with the BEM team at our own hackathon.

Why did we do it?

The BEM team spent a lot of last year getting to know people from the community. That involved a lot of online communication, conferences and BEMups, where we all met, chatted and discussed our experience.

At one point we realized that the simple talk format was no longer enough. People were trying their hand at their own projects and facing some real problems in the process. Where possible, we gave online assistance via messengers and forums. But that wasn't enough.

As far as live events were concerned, we were gradually moving from talks to master classes. When the increase in the developers' level became evident, we had an idea to conduct a master class in reverse, where BEMup participants carried out assignments under our guidance.

We saw that many enjoyed "on the spot" coding and were good at it. Why not then have a bash at a BEM hackathon? We seemed to be equal to the task, as challenging as it was — the team had grown and were ready to present projects and answer questions, our Yandex colleagues were keen to take part and help us with our teams, and there was already a sufficient number of developers "from the outside" with the necessary skill level, creating their own BEM projects.

So it was settled. We recorded a and it was off from there!

The next few months were spent in preparation: we had to find people to lead the projects, decide what those projects would be, select participants for the hackathon, help some of them get to Moscow. There was a lot of work involved but I think we managed.

Why hackathons are good

All the details of the project presentations, of people forming teams, working hard, not sleeping, eating pizzas and presenting their project results at the end have already been covered by other participants in their post-hackathon posts. So I'm going to talk about something else.

What were those two days like? The participants gave different descriptions: strenuous, fun, interesting, enlightening, exhausting. The main answer though is that they were productive! There was not a project that didn't make it to the end. Some people may not have been able to achieve their original goals but everyone did their best.

Our hackathon took place in a very friendly atmosphere. Everyone already knew each other either from the BEMups or through previous online communication. Participants didn't hesitate to offer assistance to or seek advice from members of "rival" teams. I am not sure if that was because our chosen event format didn't imply competition as such or because the event attracted the right kind of people or if it's just the way BEM influences people :) It's something that everyone can judge for themselves.

What did we all get out of the hackathon?

I believe first of all it was the drive to push on and grow further professionally. Working alongside smart and determined people as one team, realizing that you've managed able to create a product together, small as it may be, within a short period of time — all of that drives you and spurs you on and pushes you to keep learning and growing further.

Secondly, result-oriented teamwork is a great motivator. Somewhere in the dark corners of your soul your own conscience begins to hint how your performance during regular work hours could perhaps be improved :)

Thirdly, a hackathon brings people closer. Before, we'd been staying in contact, exchanging emails, retweeting each other's messages but rarely meeting in real life. The hackathon let us put faces to names. Some people made friends, some people started projects together :) One way or another, that was a big step forward for the community.

I could go on and give you a "forthly", a "fifthly" and so on, up to "tenthly". The important thing, though, is that everyone who took part in the event had their own wonderful and exciting journey and enriched their life experience!

Not empty-handed, or the BEM Blog project

Incidentally, I came to the hackathon with a project of my own. I planned to finish a BEM stack-based blog, which I'd begun to write during the Camp JS conference in Australia when we were staying for a couple of days at a camp with no Internet connection.

I wasn't able to get a team together, people found other projects more interesting :) However, I didn't drop the project altogether, and did a bit of coding now and then in between consulting other teams.

My project was about creating a full-blown engine on which you could deploy a small website using the full BEM technology stack, in a way that should be no more difficult to do than by using WordPress. Both file system based markdown files and a database of some sort could be used as data sources. Themes were to be provided by a redefinition level containing BEMTREE and BEMHTML templates, CSS and JS.

I was aiming for a product that could be used in two modes: as a static page generator to avoid the need to search for specialized hosting supporting Node.js, and as a dynamic application.

Results

So what was I able to achieve before and during the hackathon? Currently the blog can generate pages from markdown format.

Obviously, I'm still a long way away from the product I would like to see in the end. And if I do manage to make time for further development, I'm most likely to rewrite the existing code pretty much from scratch ;)

However, those wishing to collaborate with me on the project are more than welcome to join!

The project description can be found in the repository.

Further plans for the project are presented on wiki.

Let's code the blog together and stay all a little bit BEMed!