Post-hackathon thoughts

It has been a few days, and we have (sort of) landed.

I shall call this year's Oslo.pm Perl 6 Patterns hackathon a success, judging by how the participants seemed to enjoy themselves during the hackathon, and the inspired blogging afterwards.

Salve (sjn) and Rune (krunen) have, on behalf of Oslo.pm, delivered to standards that I am a bit worried that guests now will come to expect ;), and although I did not have capacity to help with much, I am happy with how everything turned out, except for one thing:

Damian caught a cold, and was essentially out of the loop for most of the hackathon.

Darnit.

But he delivered a kick-ass talk on Thursday, and was very helpful and a very good resource before he somewhat reluctantly accepted the thrown towel.

I did not do much hacking this year myself, but I managed to revive some of my Perl 6 skills. I even fiddled a bit with the cookbook (dormant for three years or so, and therefore slightly out-of-date in some respects). I hope to contribute more to that piece of documentation in the coming months.

The bonus if I manage to work my way through it, is that I will be pretty much up to speed with the language. Win!

My thanks go to all the participants of the Hackathon, without you, Perl 6 would be much the poorer!

Oslo.pm Patterns Hackathon pictures

Hacking: sjn, moritz (back), pmichaud, jnthn, masak, tadzik, sergot, bjarneh

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Hacking: imarcusthis, infosophy

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Posing, back to front, left to right:
infosophy, moritz, arnsholt, sjn, krunen, masak
tadzik, jnthn, frettled, pmichaud

Oslo.pm Perl 6 Patterns Hackathon 2012

In one week (2012-04-20 – 2012-04-22), a bunch of bright people will attend the Perl 6 Patterns Hackathon in Oslo.

Perl 6 – both its specification and implementations – will become one of the Great Ones. I admit that we are not quite there yet, but to me, Perl 6 is a language for the long term.

In one of the meetings krunen, sjn and I had this winter, we discussed this, and how to get there. I hope the Perl 6 Patterns Hackathon will contribute significantly, and I also hope that in 30-60 years, we will look back and be happy about most of the choices made around this time! I truly believe that we can get there!

Call for sponsor matching

In this spirit, Ingvoldstad IT decided to sponsor this hackathon with NOK 5,000 (≈ EUR 650), and I hereby call for other companies who develop software* to match this amount. Oslo.pm will put those money to good use!


I hope to see you in Oslo in a week!

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* I did not write "Perl" here, because I think that is largely irrelevant. Perl 6 is an amalgam of many of the most interesting programming language features, and offers a very compelling path to those who want a next-generation language after the current versions of e.g. Perl, Python, and Ruby.

Group Photos

LR:
ilmari, nothingmuch, claes, szabgab, krunen, ingy, baest, masak, TimToady, Ellen\
trafl, jrockway, batman, pnu, jnthn, pmichaud, abigail, Gloria\
mst, sjn, mberends, marcus, sadrak
Photographer: frettled




And, finally, as prompted by Ingy:

NPW 2009 Hackathon

The NPW 2009 Hackathon is well into its second day, and I've learned quite a bit about Perl 6 and more about Perl 5 than I expected.

I didn't originally intend to participate in the Hackathon, and I'm not doing much, but it's definitely worth it.

Yesterday, I stated a goal of adding to the spec a description of how complex numbers should be represented and presented, since that was apparently at least partially unclear.

This lead me into a quagmire of other things I needed to do first, and the "ooh, shiny!" phenomenon lead me astray a few times, ganged up with my general desire to have a functional working environment (Unicode strings in PODs didn't go down well with my current Latin 1-based working environment and the then-installed Perl version), as well as problems getting irssi on my side
But I did get to participate and act as distraction in an entertaining and useful discussion regarding types in Perl 6, as well as host a social dinner for those who wanted a break from the hackathon.

Today, I'm picking up where I left off, trying to form a mental picture of the spec that's good enough to add and/or change relevants bits of it.

The rest of the guys are adding code and doing other useful things. :)