Amsterdam Clojurians Bug Killing Hackathon, a meetup report

[Carlo Sciolla]

Dear community organizers,

I just wanted to report back the awesome experience we had last night here in the Netherlands, in case some of you would like to experiment with the same format.

Intro: I'm one of the laziest bastards that ever organized anything, and as such I'm always on a lookout for simple and low-effort meetup themes. There are not so many people around here willing to present something, and while the "let's figure out what to do tonight" format often plays very well, it becomes boring after a while. So here's the idea I decided to experiment with: why don't we roll up our sleeves and try to fix real bugs in real projects from Clojureland?

The format was dead easy and took just a little preparation:

- you prepare a short list of bugs and issues collected from various projects (clj, cljs, ring, om, compojure, reagent, enlive, hiccup, you name it)

- you also ask your meetweeps (or meetuppers, whatever works best in English) to bring some more bugs if they have anything they'd like to tackle

- the day of the meetup, you collect and make a short intro of all the bugs currently on the plate (make sure to have at least as many as half of the attendance)

- let the people form pairs or small teams, making sure to evenly mix newbies and pro's

- each team picks and chooses what bug to start working on

- you let the teams work with the pomodoro technique, so that you have short brakes to allow for coffee or discussions in between coding sessions

- keep the list of bugs visible to the audience, so that when a team is done with something they can tackle some new bug

- when time is up, make a little summary of the accomplishments and praise anyone that succeeded in killing at least one bug

The above format was a big success. Both experts and newcomers got their hands dirty with code, and at the end of the night we had some patches being sent or about to be (currently published are the patches for http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-1565 and http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-1305, and http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-1467 one more upcoming shortly for http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-1576), which resulted in a huge positive vibe.

Possible improvements are:

- better appraisal of the bug killers: publish pictures of each team with a description of their achievements; stop all the teams for a quick celebration when a patch is submitted

- make sure the contributor agreement is signed by everyone upfront instead of finishing the night with code still to be committed because of that

- make a better selection of the bugs (I only spent 30m before the start. Told you I was lazy!)

Hope the above report is of any use for someone else.

Happy meetupping,

c.

[Sean Corfield]

This is a great idea Carlo! Kudos for getting four patches submitted on Clojure!

Sean

[Alex Miller]

Thanks! Great work!

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