Here we are, 4 developers with at least some javascript knowledge (enough to get by). One of us is the creator of a javascript library to give higher level access to the browser WebAudio feature.
We all agree that it would be nice to work on that.
So for an hour or so, he presents us the library and its components. He explains us how he uses it to treat his guitar output in realtime for example. Discussing it, we realize that the library has no way to generate music and we agree it would be nice to have that feature. It's hard to get into an unknown library so we basically take a single keyboard and do pair-programming (the 4 of us) to get this feature out.
After 30 minutes, we have a JS function to generate a music note.
Then we look at each other and we say:
- It would be cool to be able to play several notes at the same time
- It would be cool to map our computer keyboard to notes so that we could play the piane on our keyboard
- It would be cool to read a music-JSON encoded music partition and play it in realtime
And so each of us took on to work on one of those topics.
And by the end of the evening, we had some code to do all 3 of those things!
That's what we can do at a Hackergarten