Programmers@Illinois is a multi-unit effort to increase and facilitate collaboration between programmers and their units across campus.
Join the list programmers@lists.illinois.edu.
Take the programmer survey to share some information about technologies your unit is using. These results will be searchable by other campus programmers so those using or wanting to use the same technology can link up.
The group meets on a random day the last week of every month. If you would like to contribute or have an idea of your own, contact any of the users listed under a specific project or email the mailing list. Contact Steven Holland for a list of ongoing projects.
By providing avenues of communication and tracking and showing (currently unavailable) data about programmers on campus; we hope to foster, at the minimum, and environment where one can find other programmers on campus using a certain technology so they can ask questions, share advice, and bounce ideas off one another.
Many programming groups on campus already focus on providing campus-level end-user solutions. Programmers@Illinois takes a slightly different approach by focusing on providing tools and resources to help programmers program. Every department and unit (with programming resources) on campus have or want to make their own one-stop-shop portal for themselves and express extreme reluctance in using a campus solution for a varieety of legitimate reasons. We believe in centralizing code, effort, tools, and knowledge; not full blown applications.
Ideally and ultimately we hope Programmers@Illinois can be a vehicle for reducing duplication of effort. If people are communicating and aware of what each other are working on, perhaps joint solutions can be done instead of two slightly different ones. As a basic example: Nearly every unit has some sort of automated task for pulling data from EDW into their local database so they can use that information. The local tables are often very similiar, tracking users, locations, buildings, classes, etc. Ideally only one centralized unit should be building off these commanlities and expending time and programmer power to maintain it. Programmers@Illinois intends to investigate these possibilities.