Hackathon in Prague report

[Vaclav Pech]

Hello everyone,

still all excited about the progress we made I'd like to briefly report on our latest hacking event in Prague.

Inspired by Hamlet's hackergarten idea and thank's to Jan Novotny's (@novoj) enthusiasm we organized an evening Hackathon for the CZJUG community last Friday. This was the first event of this sort around, so there wasn't much practical experience we could build on beyond my participation in the Gr8Conf hackergarten earlier this year.
We were lucky to get JetBrains to give us a room and sponsor food. With me being the host, GPars (http://gpars.codehaus.org) became a natural choice for our hacking.

Following the hackergarten tradition we picked small achievable targets, like fixing code samples in the documentation, creating performance benchmarks or building sample code demonstrating use of the new and fresh GPars Java API. So people didn't have to have detailed knowledge of neither Groovy nor concurrency and still could participate from the very beginning.
While playing with the code, an unexpected bug, which only shows up on certain setup (ah, concurrency), was detected, indentified and in a fierce joint hunt eliminated. Nothing shows the spirit of these events better than this bug-hunting episode.

Within the 5 hour timeframe our 8 men team has enjoyed great time, gained hands-on experience with several technologies and techniques and contributed useful code to an open source project.
From the feedback gathered after the event we'll most likely organize another event in about 2 - 3 months. Everybody left happy and excited.

I recommend you tried organizing hackergarten events in you communities. BTW, there are still a few suitable tasks left in the GPars issue tracker ;)

Regards,

Vaclav



--
E-mail: vacla...@gmail.com
Blog: http://www.jroller.com/vaclav
Linkedin page: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vaclavpech

[Dierk König]

great stuff!

keep it up

Dierk

[Novoj]

Hello,

I've created a short resume from our first session in Prague here:

http://blog.novoj.net/2010/11/18/hackathon-gpars-kolo-prvni/

Google translation (it's written in Czech in original as I target
Czech Java community on the first place):

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=cs&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=cs&tl=en&u=http://blog.novoj.net/2010/11/18/hackathon-gpars-kolo-prvni/

Thank you for all your experience you previously shared with us -
we benefited from it a lot.
Now, we can say that we all are GPars commiters (even if we
contributed a small piece of this stuff).

Regards,
Jan

> E-mail: vaclav.p...@gmail.com