About

A quick history

Matthew Nuzum co-founded the group with Jeremy Harrington back in 2008. Justin Stevens joined the group in 2009 and took on a leadership role in 2010.

How members benefit from belonging to DSM Web Geeks

There is a lot of creativity in what we as web producers do. The tools are constantly changing and the ways in which the web is interacted with is constantly being reinvented. Graphic design or copy writing leans on disciplines from other industries, and often — because of ties to a print medium — has a hard time conforming to the web. Programmers find challenges too in a constantly changing technology, and an increasingly more web savvy audience. The role of Web Geeks is to provide a sand box environment for enthusiastic web producers to play, be creative, and take risks. It’s not always OK to fail at a web project for your clients; this is where Web Geeks comes in. Web Geeks events give web producers a chance to experiment with user interface design ideas and new technology trends.

DSM Web Geeks’ community involvement

We try our best to involve the community; everyone is welcome at our events, the source code from each Coding Dojo is made pubic, and anyone can post questions on our Google Group (http://groups.google.com/group/dsmwebgeeks) or our IRC channel (freenode #dsmwebgeeks) if they need help or advice. The challenges we tackle in the Coding Dojos are great general purpose tools that could be used by anyone. While we are planning we try to be relevant and build tools that address a real-world problem, but also allow us to play with different technologies.

What are the Web and Coding Dojo’s

Each of our events, whether it is a Web Dojo (focusing on web development challenges), a Design Dojo (focusing on web design challenges), or a presentation on a web trend, focuses on sharing knowledge and improving skill levels in all aspects of a web development project including programming, designing, copy writing, and project management.

Specifically a Web Geeks Dojo is a meeting in which web enthusiasts team up to work collaboratively on a challenge. Participants are there to learn and explore. Members learn best practices from each other, learn how to work collaboratively with one another, and learn how to use their time efficiently. One of our first Dojo challenges was to build a URL shortener like tinyurl.com. We had about 5 groups come up with a unique solution, but only two of the groups had a working project. When the time limit was reached each group presented their project in it’s current state completed or not. Presenters shared their process and explained their challenges. During one team’s presentation, the audience was able to trouble shoot the teams biggest challenge and help finish their project before they were done presenting.