Skip to content

About the Spokane Tech Project

The Spokane Tech website is a project for the community made by the community. The aim of the project is to deliver a community resource for all things tech in the Inland Northwest while providing an opportunity for contributes to gain real-world experience in a shared open source project.

Why are we doing this?

Reason 1:

There is a thriving tech community in Spokane, but many members of our community are disconnected. With multiple tech groups on different platforms, such as meetup and eventbrite, there are often events of interest happening that many tech enthusiasts are not aware of. The intent is to have a single resource that includes local tech groups and the events they host.

Reason 2:

Many developers in our community, especially those earlier in their career, have skills and drive, but haven't had the opportunity to work on a project in a real professional environment. For example, a developer could have great knowledge in coding, but hasn't yet had the first professional job or participated in project with milestones, project planning, code reviews, etc. The Spokane Tech project aims to provide this and give contributes a project they can reference for career development, personal portfolios, interviews, etc.

Initial Vision

What our project (and webapp) becomes will ultimately be dictated by members of the project and will likely evolve over time. Below are some details of the initial vision.

Phase One:

Have a web site that houses groups and events. Events may be manually or automatically added to our site. We will have views that list all the groups and events, as well as detail pages for each group and event. Ideally we'll also have a calendar view that can list all events and perhaps be filterable.

Phase Two:

Have event requests and suggestions capabilities. Here members can post a suggested events they want to give or have someone else give, and others can up/down vote the event (think reddit or stackoverflow). This can be used to prioritize events base on community interest. This can also serve as a living backlog of event ideas. Add labels to events, such as technical areas (frontend, scripting, ML, etc.) and topic levels (beginner/intermediate/etc.). With labels people can filter event based on interest and other criteria.

Phase Three:

Build member profiles. With profiles, we can have some basic metrics on things like career level, geographic location, interested and expertise. This data can help provide viability into the overall tech presence in Spokane and help drive event topics and location. This could also be a future resource to make available to local businesses and the community for things like contract work, etc. (There has been some outside interest in this type of resource)

Future goals:

The Spokane Tech project was started mostly by members of the Spokane Python User Group (SPUG), so naturally the first version of the website is based on python. In the future the project may be re-created in other languages/frameworks/etc. (such as Golang or Rust) as member interest dictates. This is intended to foster growth, knowledge-sharing, and exposure to different tech stacks and methodologies.

Interested in participating? Great! Read on...

Here are a few things you can do to get started.

  • Go to the site and explore. It's live at https://www.spokanetech.org

  • Look through the open issues and find one that interests you (issues tagged "good first issue" could be great candidates) on github

  • Read our blog to learn more about the project, follow development and design decisions, and step through the process of building the site.

  • Clone the repo to you machine and run locally, explore the code, break things, fix things, have fun. Step by step instructions are in the CONTRIBUTION doc on github.

  • Have a feature idea or found a bug? Create an issue on github.

Need more help or direction?

Join the Discord channel (best option)
or post a question on github

New to python, django, git, webdev? Reach out in the Discord channel and suggest a virtual meet. We'll schedule these on occasion, or as interest dictates. This can be used as q&a sessions, code paring, shared code reviews, or just follow along as a member works on an issue.