Harker Summit

Earlier this month, the team got together for our fifth Harker Summit - a mini-conference held in our office to discuss current and future plans for all of our affairs. This included some technical discussions about our software, as well as some non-technical discussions relating to Tone of Voice and accessibility in web development.

To dive deeper into accessibility and learn about good software development practice, we had a go at reporting a goose sighting! A simple, fake, process to report a fictitious goose sighting filled with accessibility mishaps for us to identify. To find out more about this workshop, check out Noah Gairing's (Casual Software Developer) blog post here.

We also had Harker’s first ever guest speaker! The Housing First Programme Manager at the LCRCA, Sarah Goodwin, who gave a presentation about how she and her colleagues assist homeless people with a caring, hands-on approach. This talk was incredibly eye opening as it really demonstrated the value that the Harker platform will have for homelessness initiatives. By talking about the current hurdles faced by Housing First (and similar organisations) we could clearly see that our work was going to achieve something meaningful and give back in major ways.

Towards the end off the day Matthew Frank, Graduate Software Developer, gave a presentation on how Harker can build a UI for providing the key insights and summaries on data. This included his findings after researching the xyflow React library, which allows for the creation of node-based user interfaces. This allowed for a collaborative discussion around how Harker will set itself apart by presenting users with an intuitive interface to create the flexible insights that they need. This discussion perfectly transitioned into the final event of the day, which was discussing the next steps for Harker development. After a detailed discussion about the specific types of insights Harker will empower, the immediate steps will be to develop our simple and advanced reporting features, where the advanced reporting will design for users confident enough with Harker to create complex data insights.

Harker Summit was an incredibly productive day as always, which facilitated important conversations between the team to fuel the next stages of Harker development. We are now stronger and more motivated than ever, being ready to continue our pace for the launch of Harker in March 2025.