I’m always looking for ways to get humans together for meaningful (potentially lasting) interactions at our conferences. So we’re trying something new this year during the tutorial day. It happens on the first (or 0th?) day of the conference on purpose: so the work can continue for the rest of the conference. My hope is to bring project owners/committers together with aspiring contributors and bring more people into the fold of projects which need help. Think of it as a room full of code sprints happening all at once. Here’s the description:
Project Owners: Do you have a project you’d like to work with other people on? Maybe it’s an established Open Source project. Maybe it’s a new idea. Come find like-minded developers and spend the day hacking together.
Developers: Are you looking to get involved in an Open Source project but need a bootstrapping session to get you started? Looking for chances to meet other developers and establish collaborative working relationships? Looking to learn by collaborating with others? Come find a project and spend the day sitting side-by-side with one or more of its developers learning the ropes and contributing code.
RailsConf is the largest physical gathering of Ruby and Rails developers internationally. Let’s take advantage of all being in one place at the same time AND take the chance to give something back to the projects and community which we so greatly benefit from.
In the morning, project leaders and representatives will have a chance to make a short pitch for their projects and the work they hope to get done. For the rest of the day, groups will self-organize and write code! Roll up your sleeves and prepare to learn, teach, and most importantly, contribute.
Go to this page and add your project or idea to the list of projects likely to be active in the Code Drive.
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.
February 3rd, 2008 at 03:09 AM
Fun question: can I do this without paying to attend the conference? :)
February 3rd, 2008 at 08:29 AM
I think something like this would be great for the community. There are several Ruby projects that need some loving attention, and there is plenty of new inspiration to take root.
February 3rd, 2008 at 01:49 PM
Jeremy, no I don’t think it’ll be entirely free. Will give that some thought though.
February 3rd, 2008 at 02:40 PM
Glad to see this happening. We’ve had a “hackathon” before ApacheCon for several years now and it’s the highlight of the conference for many of us. That said, I think within Apache we could do better at focusing the hackathon on code and not just socializing. One thought I’ve had is to make sure people have a chance to report back to the conference attendees what they accomplished.
February 3rd, 2008 at 02:45 PM
Will there be any organization to the ongoing work after the first day? (a room set aside, scheduled BOFs, etc?) That, and an expedited infrastructure for things like getting new projects onto Rubyforge (and Github?) would go a long way towards making this effort more successful.
February 4th, 2008 at 07:24 PM
+1 for opening this to non-paying attendees. There’s a significant Ruby community in Portland, and more than a few of us are cheap and/or self-employed. What with some life changes, I don’t have spousal approval to blow the $800 this year—but I plan on camping out for at least one day nonetheless, as I tend to get quite a bit out of the hallway track. (In fact, I’ve always been disappointed when I’ve paid for OSCON.)
I realize that this is a for-profit enterprise as far as O’Reilly is concerned, and that the resources used by such a project would have to be paid for. If the latter is an issue, I’m pretty sure we can come up with some off-site space. (CubeSpace has been incredibly great about donating use of their FlexSpace to local OSS user groups, and it’s even closer to the convention center than FreeGeek…)
February 6th, 2008 at 04:49 PM
What I fantastic idea! I was keen to get involved in a sprint of some kind last year but, what with my naturally outgoing nature, I never even quite got around to inviting myself to a Werewolf game.
I’ve taken the liberty of adding another page:
for folks that fancy getting involved but don’t have a pet project. Unfortunately, when I went to write my own, it turned into more of a lonely hearts ad, so I’m not sure it’s a great idea after all. :-)