Last year we kind of just walked into it. This year, we are going in big. The Red Hat event team will be helping to promote the event before and during Devoxx. Of course, we should use any available channel we have to communicate that this is going down.
Date: Tuesday, Nov 13, 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Link:
http://lanyrd.com/2012/devoxx/syzdq/The first step is identifying who will serve as the point person at the event for Forge. Koen seems to be the man for the job. Koen, this won't conflict with your talks. I'm also hoping that Paul will be willing to participate.
My research shows that there are three keys to making this a successful event:
1. Go for "Minimum viable pull request", then iterate
- An agile approach (1 - 2 hour sprints) works well because it keeps people focused on a goal and in sync
2. Be specific. Have a list of achievable goals from which people can select or from which to build their own ideas.
3. Prepare a working environment or resources in advance.
- I plan to have a file server there where we can stick downloads for local copying. Ray will also have a bunch of JBoss Way-related media
At the end of the day, each group working on a hack will briefly present the results (think lightning talk). The focus of that short presentation should be on the idea, not necessarily the exact state of the code. In other words, the point of the hackfest is to catalyze ideas and get people participating, not necessarily to deliver a release (but certainly we won't discourage it).
The other action item that we need from this thread is a wiki / web page dedicated for the hackfest that has:
- Event info (for organic searches)
- Idea list (perhaps pulled from JIRA and augmented with supplemental ideas)
- How to setup environment for hacking on Forge or plugins (might just be links to different resources, but that's fine, still important)
Lincoln, can you create a page on the forge site called hackfest or hackathon and that way we can reuse the page each time there is a hackfest somewhere? For the event info, we can just have a bullet list schedule of upcoming hackfests (just one to start with). Then we can start populating it with the information I've suggested and any other contributions.
-Dan