Critical Path in Chester: Our October Build Night
On Wednesday 21 October we ran Critical Path at The Cornerhouse in Chester: two hours, from six until eight, for people with one job they wanted to stop doing by hand. It was free, food and drinks were on us, and we kept it to fifteen places on purpose.
The idea is simple. You bring the job that eats your week, and you leave with it running as a flow, connected to your own systems and working on your own data. Not a demo account, and not a slide about what might be possible one day.
How the evening ran
The format is short and fixed, so that almost all of the time goes on building:
- Six o'clock, introduction. Fifteen minutes: everyone says what they brought, then a quick tour of triggers, branches, retries and expressions. Enough to build with, not enough to be a lecture.
- Quarter past six, build. An hour and a half with an engineer beside you, on your own flow, connected to your real systems. That includes the unglamorous half: what happens when a step fails, and what the flow does at two in the morning.
- Quarter to eight, debrief. Fifteen minutes on what got working, what got in the way, and where the platform let people down.
The debrief is the part we come for. Watching people wire up the job they know best tells us more about Flomation than any amount of testing in-house, and the rough edges they hit go straight onto our list.
Small on purpose
Fifteen places means there is an engineer within reach whenever someone gets stuck, and time for everyone to talk through their job rather than a few loud voices. It also means the evening is a conversation as much as a workshop, which is what the food and the bar are for.
Everyone went home with a Flomation bag.
The next one
Critical Path runs every quarter. The next date and venue are being confirmed now. Register your interest and you will hear before it is announced anywhere else, with first refusal on the fifteen places. Bring one job, the worst one, and we will help you hand it over.