Requesting feedback on our Dev Lab!

BlakeH 

First of all thank you for hosting it, I would love to see more of them. I think for us, remembering we are already up to our ears in Aurora planning, I was hoping for something more level 400/500 in how to build for Aurora.

I would love to have had a dev lab which had clear objectives i.e.:

• How to set up the SDK?
• Getting Postman Configured?
• Hints, tips, dos and don't for building effective custom components with Aurora
• Hackathon - Build your first Handlebars component
• Hackathon - Build your first react component
• React or Handlebars, that is the question
• Hackathon - Helpful utilities, code snippets
• Permissions Translation - Classic to Aurora - what's changed?
• Meet Big Pipe: The Firehose - What, why and how to handle big data
• Deep Dive - Breaking out of the community box (Integrations with pages and endpoints outside the community).
• Theming the Theme - Exploring how to setup multiple theme communities
• Aurora and AI

These are just a quick brain dump of things I would love to see in future sessions. 

It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the devlab, I just felt it was to close to a roadmap / marketing call and not close enough to an engineering call, which is what I was hoping it would be.

Loved meeting everyone though and the breakout sessions were especially productive.

I was actually wondering if any devs in the Khoros would would be interested in having a Khoros Development Office hours - maybe even community led.

Essentially a monthly call for developers across Khoros customers to get together, discuss challenges they are facing - share hints, tips and maybe even do some 'public code' development to help better the community over all?

Thanks for putting it on BlakeH and team. It was nice to meet/greet some fellow community experts. Overall, a good first go with promise. 

I think, generally/to me, it felt more oriented towards Config/Admins as opposed to Devs. 

Positive: I enjoyed the breakouts - getting a bit deeper into a few of the specific topics was nice. Controlling (to some extent) the focus of the conversation - less marketing more what we care about.

Would have been nice to see the topic options ahead of time; vote, add more, think about them for a few minutes to have my head in the game.

Improvement: More "open time" means more "in person" time. Tough to do over zoom. Would prefer a user-group feel of an evening in a nearby-town with a zoom-in option for folks that can't travel but still want to get 30% of the benefit of the in-person conversation.

I'm no developer (which is arguably a reason I shouldn't be posting here) but I would suspect that without hands-on or whiteboard-style open conversations (attempted/approximated in the breakouts) that this felt less like a DevLab and more like an Admin RoadShow.

The breakouts - as tough as it was to be a DevLab - were more engaging than the pre-breakout, big-group powerpoint. I wish I'd written things down closer to the end of the session but week-old memory says there was a bit of *marketing* in the front half that most of us don't need.
Maybe too thin a line to tread the first time...but "what features are coming, how do they behave, what pain (technically) do they solve, what are the limits" is more applicable to a dev.

(note...from here on out I'm pivoting away from the point of the DevLab and getting more into a delivery style commentary that I've noticed over the past several months...turns into a bit of a well-meaning-rant.)
Also, take notes on how often Khoros folks say "coming soon" and tone that way down. 😄 Maybe even remove it from your vernacular all together. We are "working on..." or "R&D is still discovering..." or "still developing the..." - all the verbs that come before you know the schedule for release.

"Coming Soon" to a Developer and every movie fan is measured in days/weeks or has an actual date. Most of the big things I'm looking forward to as a Program Manager are on the roadmap article for "like July" or later. That isn't soon to me even and it's not a date - that's like 2Q's away. Good for someone thinking of migrating and/or purchasing or looking at big-rocks for their dev-shop in 2025; less relevant for any but the most forward-capable DevShop.
I may be overblowing this a bit, in that one little meeting, but my frames popped when I heard it for like the 3rd time in a row after a couple of years of "...it's coming in Aurora." which is here but still doesn't have some of those things.
</rant>

I'm still a fan of the product, please do more of these (and similar), the facetime with Khoros and peers has very-long-tail value: I'll be there.

allensmith81 That's a fantastic list! BlakeH you should definitely follow that.

As someone who has put in a lot of hours customizing community classic but does not have any developer experience beyond that, I would love to see a walkthrough beginning to end of setting up the SDK with GitHub, creating and publishing a simple component (widget now I think?). This could be something extremely simple (like... <p>Hello World</p>) just to demonstrate the workflow.

A big +1 to everything allensmith81 mentioned in his comment. I think it was nice to see the roadmap and ideas behind building Aurora the way it's built, but having more of an actual "lab" would have been nice. I'm still a bit of a n00b so some of this is intimidating. I'd love to have labs similar to what Allen and others have suggested, a bit of theory/best practices on Aurora and then some demonstration and working together or sharing ideas and code snippets. 

I did appreciate getting a high level overview of how Aurora works and how to navigate the dev docs. I also enjoyed the breakouts to see how things are built. Another suggestion is providing some pre-built open source components built using best practices that we can then use as a starting point in the labs and "hackathons". This would also provide some easy references for documentation and best practices.

Overall, this was an awesome event to attend and I hope to see more similar gatherings and an evolution of these types of events. Some people may prefer just the "product marketing style"/overview style meetings while others would prefer the hands-on build it together style meetings. I did notice a pretty big drop-off in attendance when we broke into smaller groups, so breaking these into two different webinars may be helpful.

Thank you for the awesome Dev Lab session! As for any critiques, I agree with Lief in the idea that it was pretty high-level opposed to dev oriented. Beyond that, I really enjoyed going into the breakout sessions to go over more fine-detailed topics. If I would've changed anything about it, I would've liked to choose a task prior to the lab rather than hoping the group we were all with would agree on the same topic. I think that would allow the breakout groups to relate to everyone who's a part of them. Most of the other points I would make have already been brought up, but seeing the big picture ideas and thought processes behind Aurora was extremely helpful.