There will be a Galaxy Hackathon at Johns Hopkins immediately preceding - and in some part overlapping with - GCC2014.
What's a Hackathon?
A hackathon is an intense event at which a group of developers with different backgrounds and skills collaborate hands-on and face-to-face to develop working code that is useful to the community as a whole. Hackathons gather people in a room where than can focus on coding, free of distractions that are inevitable when you are in your office.
Hackathons are driven by participants. Participants propose and coalesce around a set of core goals early on the first day, and then spend the rest of their time working towards those goals.
Who Should Attend?
This event is for you if you
- write code
- are passionate about improving Galaxy and/or Cloudman
- know something about Galaxy and/or Cloudman internals
- have 2 or 3 free days this June
| Register Now |
|---|
There is limited space for this event and we don't yet have a very good feel for the level of interest there is in participating. **Therefore to avoid 60 people showing up for an event that can accommodate 40 people at most, we have a [registration form here](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gcc2014-galaxy-hackathon-tickets-10984507959). Once the 40 seats available have been claimed, they're gone.** If you're interested in this, please register soon.
Schedule
Schedule? At a hackathon?
Hackathons are self-organizing events and attempts to impose anything as detailed as an agenda should be met with resistance and humor. With that in mind, this schedule tries to provide the absolute minimum amount of structure needed to ensure that something actually gets done.
The hackathon is "officially" scheduled for three days, starting on Saturday, June 28. The first two days will happen in the Taylor Lab at Johns Hopkins. The last "official" day overlaps with the Training Day and we haven't yet decided if that will happen in the Taylor Lab or at the conference venue. Our hope is that hackathoners will be able to slip in out during this day.
We keep putting official in quotes because our hope is that activity will continue throughout the conference and afterward as well. If you have experience with hackathons you know that followup is often a challenge. The project will do all it can to support followup efforts. We very much want to make sure that the efforts from this hackathon make it into the code.
Minimum Amount of Structure
Here's a proposal for "the absolute minimum amount of structure needed to ensure that something actually gets done."
Pre-Hackathon
One challenge with hackathons is getting things done in the short amount of time the event itself is going on. To help this along we'll use a Trello board to help organize both ideas and people into concrete projects and teams. The hackathon organizers will be active contributors to the board both to seed ideas (though, add your own as well, please!) and offer commentary on proposed projects. We'll use Trello throughout the event to keep track of project status and changes, and as a way to transition completed projects and related documentation to the regular Galaxy or Cloudman development Trello boards for inclusion, so please do check out and contribute to the board.
Day 0: Saturday, June 28
We'll meet at the Taylor Lab.
| 9:30 | Welcome Participant introductions: 1-3 minutes each, including 1-2 things you hope to achieve at this hackathon |
|---|---|
| 10:15 | Task proposals: 5 mins per proposal |
| xx:xx | Brownian motion, coalescence, and bonding around a subset of of task proposals/teams |
| xx:xx | Hacking, lunch, hacking, dinner, hacking |
Day 1: Sunday, June 29
We'll meet at the Taylor Lab.
| 9:30 | Team status reports |
|---|---|
| 10:00 | Hacking, lunch, hacking |
| 5:30 | Team status reports. This will include each team's plans for meeting over the next three days, and how each team plans to followup after GCC2014 is done. |
| 7:00 | Hackathon dinner @ Golden West Cafe Thanks to Curoverse (give Jonathan a hug!) |
Day 2: Monday, June 30
We will meet at the Taylor Lab or at the conference venue. The GCC2014 Training Day starts today, and so do conference meals. We aren't yet sure if there will be one place for participants to meet or if teams will be distributed around the venue.
There is probably no formal hackathon schedule for today other than a single evening meeting at which everyone presents their work so far. During the day, teams will meet according to their own agreements and continue work.
Lastly, each team will send out their final pre-conference team report for that day, via email, before midnight.
Post-Hackathon: GCC2014
Teams are encouraged to continue work and meet during breaks and other unscheduled time.
Post-GCC2014
Join us in IRC (irc.freenode.net #galaxyproject) and keep on hacking!
Costs
There is no registration cost for the hackathon. Why? Please thank the sponsors. Repeatedly.
Participants will need to cover their own lodging costs, and (most) of their own meal costs. We will do our best to keep caffeine flowing throughout the event.
Sponsors
[Curoverse](https://curoverse.com/), makers of the [Arvados](https://arvados.org/) open source bioinformatics platform,
is the exclusive Peta level Hackathon sponsor
[Amazon Web Services](http://aws.amazon.com) is the Hackathon Cloud Infrastructure sponsor
There are still several Giga-level sponsorships available. If you are interested in sponsoring this event, please contact the organizers.
Twitter Hashtag
Please use #usegalaxy as the Twitter hashtag for the Hackathon, and anything else related to GCC2014.
Is this part of GCC2014?
Mostly yes, but, there is a separate registration process, and a separate organizing committee.