Hackathon-Attendees' HOWTO

This document is an attempt to gather suggestions and recommendations so that people coming to their first Hackathon can more easily hit the ground running and have a better Hackathon experience in general.

A fair number of the Chicago Hackathon participants were attending their first such event. While hopefully everyone enjoyed themselves and felt like their time at the Hackathon was worthwhile, the impression I got was that a lot of folks could have had an easier time 'getting started', as it were.

Whether you're a hardened Hackathoner or someone who just attended your first Perl Foundation event, you surely have some tidbits of advice to share. Please contribute freely and edit ruthlessly.

Pre-Hackathon preparation

• Pick a project: Have a look at the projects list and pick one that you might be interested in working on. (Better yet, pick two or three). If time permits before the Hackathon, check out the source code, build it, and muck around with it a little bit. Having a basic feel for how the project works will let you work on more interesting things once you're actually at the Hackathon.
• If you don't have time, or have trouble building from the sources, don't worry about it -- there will be plenty of folks at the Hackathon who'll be more than happy to help you get up and running.
• If you'll be travelling any appreciable distance to the Hackathon, consider trying to find out who else is going from your area. You may be able to find a travelling companion to speak Perl to on your trip instead of having to listen to the guy in the next airline seat drone on about his colon surgery.

Stuff to bring

• Laptop: Obviously, you'll want a computer to work on, and a laptop is most convenient for this sort of thing -- not only because it's easy to bring to the Hackathon, but because it lets you easily move around and join the impromptu sessions that tend to spring up around the pool or in the hotel lobby. A desktop could probably be made to work, though, so long as you're willing to lug it back and forth from your room each day, and as long as it has...
• WiFi: most hotels these days provide internet connectivity only in wireless form. While there'll certainly be someone around who's nice enough to share an ethernet port, if you can manage to get a hold of a WiFi adapter your networking will be much more convenient.
• Miscellaneous things: Think it might be useful? Bring it along! At Chicago, we had more than enough networking and power cables, but more never hurts. Other things that turned out to be useful were networking gear and spare laptop power adapters. Things we missed included a projector and a proper bottle opener.
• Your comfy coding clothes: If you'd rather lounge around in slippers and pyjama pants than shoes and khakis, by all means bring them. I left my favourite fuzzy blue socks at home, then felt a bit foolish when the guy across the room was coding in pink monkey banana pyjamas.

Arrival

• Geeky shirt: If you own a Perl-themed shirt or something else that makes it obvious you're a Hackathon attendee, consider wearing it to the Hackathon, especially if you'll be showing up at the Hackathon early and if you've never met the organizers face-to-face. It'll be easier for your fellow Perl hackers to pick you out.

At the Hackathon

• Don't be afraid to ask questions. Nobody will look down upon you for calling out "Hey, can somebody help me compile X?" (In fact, some of the most interesting things that went on at Chicago sprung from trying to help people build Parrot.)

After the Hackathon

• Contribute your newfound insights to this Hackathon Attendees HOWTO, so that the next generation of first-time attendees can benefit from them. =)

	Who	Fri	Sat	Sun	From Where	Online
A	David Adler (dha)	√	√	√	New York	dha on irc.perl.org
B	Jess Balint	X?	X	X?	Chicago	jessb5760
C	chromatic		√	√ !	Portland, OR
	Jason Carter		√ !		Crystal Lake, IL
	Jason Crome		√	√	DeKalb, IL	TheOneCromeDome
D	Richard Dice	√	√	√ !	Toronto, ON
	Matt Diephouse	√	√	X	Ann Arbor, MI
	Chris Dolan		√		Madison, WI
	Clyde Forrester		X		Forest Park, IL
F	Mike Fragassi		X		Chicago
G	Jerry Gay	√	√	√	Seattle, WA	mikethepod
	Patty Giorgas	X			Chicago
	Ryan Gerry		√	X	McHenry, IL
	Jason Gessner				Milwaukee, WI
H	Todd Hepler	√	X	X	St. Louis, MO
I	Kelli Ireland	√	√		Pittsburgh, PA	kelli3125
J	Andrew Johnson	?	√		Downers Grove, IL
	Kirsten Jones	√	√	√	Scotts Valley, CA	synedra@mac.com
K	Jim Keenan	√	√	√	Brooklyn, NY	irc.perl.org: kid51
	Pete Krawczyk	√	√	√	Wonder Lake, IL	pkrawczy
	Ken Krugler		√		Silicon Valley, CA
L	Andy Lester	√	√	√	McHenry, IL	petdance
	Doug Lim	X	√	X	Schaumburg, IL	dlim60194 doug_lim.rm
M	Josh McAdams		√	X	Chicago, IL
	John Melesky	√ !	X		Chicago, IL	phaedrusdeinus
	Adnan Menon	X			Chicago
O	Bill Odom	√	√	√	St. Louis, MO
P	Steve Peters		X?	X	Madison, WI	fisharerojo
	Pete Prodoehl		√		Milwaukee, WI	pjraster
	Jonathan Rockway	√	√	X	Chicago, IL	irc.perl.org: jrockway
	Andrew Rodland			√	Chicago	irc: hobbs
S	Chip Salzenberg	√	√	√	Jupiter	irc.perl.org: chip GroutNASA
	Michael Schwern	√	√	√	Portland, OR	MichaelSchwern irc.perl.org:Schwern
	Rick Scott	√	√	√	Sault Ste Marie, ON	irc.perl.org:shadowspar
	Elliot Shank	√	√	√	Chicago, IL	elliotshank
	Mark W. "catfood" Schumann		X	X	Cleveland, OH
	Vishal Soni	X	X	X	Minneapolis, MN
	Michael Stemle	√	√	X	Chicago, IL	irc.perl.org:manchicken mannhuhn
	Ken Swanson	√	X		St. Louis, MO
T	Al Tobey				Grand Rapids, MI	Tobert42
W	Michael R. Wolf	√	√	√	Seattle, WA
	Jonathan Worthington	√	√	√	Scarborough, England	irc.perl.org: jonathan

√ marks people who have arrived.

(Please keep this in alphabetical order)

Picking a place

We went for cheap this time out. For all we knew, it would be Andy, Pete and Chip sitting around scratching our butts. Our only real requirements were:

• Wifi
• Meeting room near sleeping rooms
• Relatively inexpensive
• Near commerce, preferably including a 24-hour store
• Able to bring in our own food

We were out in far northwest suburban Crystal Lake, which may have been harder to get to, but we wouldn't have been to get $79 any closer to the city. We also were not interested in having a lot of other interesting things in the area, since the goal was to have people working on code.

When we got down to it, we found that there was no Ethernet in the walls, and for the one guy with a laptop without wifi, Pete had to route his Internet traffic to a hub for him. Having the ability to get on the network through a jack would have been a big win, both for that guy, and to have alternate, backup WAPs.

The BYOfood requirement was the first thing on our minds, because we'd gotten in trouble at YAPC::NA 2006 for bringing in our own pizza & snacks, because Sodhexo cornered the IIT food market. They were pretty upset with us. This excluded the local Holiday Inn.

Continuous space usage was important. Losing out Sunday morning, to a long-standing church group, meant fewer people showed up. We wound up clustered in the breakfast nook and around the pool with laptops waiting for our space to become free again. More people may have shown up Sunday had our space been available the entire time. Still, we had until 6am on Sunday to use the space, and we were in there until 2am.

Not having a VGA projector was a problem, leaving Ken Krugler scrambling to get one a few hours before his presentation. We should have been more explicit that he would need to supply one if he needed it, since we were doing no presentations. Turns out the hotel thought we meant an "overhead projector" and not a "laptop projector" in our discussions.

More than the presentations, it would have been good if people working on projects could have had a common screen to work, or to do demonstrations to the groups. Also worthwhile would have been the social aspects of showing movies when hacking was done for the night.

When people actually show up

You can't plan for everything. Power outage, thunderstorm, etc.

Dinner by democracy works to a point - 12 Chinese dishes was OK, but 3 thin and 8 pan pizzas was about 3 pans too many. (If we had paid for the pizzas, it might have been a bigger issue.)

Always be sure to have labels, both for humans and their belongings. We emptied my labelmaker, and the corny "Hello My Name Is" tags were indispensable when we had 30 people clustered around six tables on Saturday night.

Having defined start/stop times might have been helpful, so people knew when to show up.

There were a handful of people who came in and said "How can I help? Who do I talk to?" Next time, project owners should have very specific, bite-sized tasks that people can work on as soon as they walk in the door. If possible, those tasks should cover a range of skill levels.

Snacks were purchased as needed. This helped cut down on waste (although there is quite a bit left over) at the expense of lower food costs, because they weren't bought from Costco or Sam's Club. If a good store is nearby, get some basics and let people decide what else they want. (We spent less on snacks at this hackathon than at the one after YAPC.) The key is, we bought small at first, and bought more later.

Location

Public transit wasn't as good at this location, so Andy and Pete did a lot of shuttling people around. (For that matter, we did a lot of not shuttling people around as communications got crossed.) The jury is out as to whether this was good or bad, as it removed more distractions and kept people together and hacking.

We didn't make explicitly clear in the site that people should fly into O'Hare. All our discussions of getting to the hotel assumed that people would fly into O'Hare, and not Midway. Since Midway is served by a number of low-cost airlines, a few people went through Midway and had a much harder time getting out to Crystal Lake than they should have. This was aggravated by the bad weather Thursday and Friday.

Try and line up taxi recommendations for next time. If people can cluster arrival or departure, a $90 taxi among 3-4 people may be better than wasting 2-3 extra hours with public transit.

Projects

Have a focus, but don't force people to do it. If someone comes into the room, be able to answer the question, "What can I do to help?"

Be able to introduce a newbie and have them help right away. We had more new people contributing to Parrot during the hackathon than established programmers.

Don't be afraid to vocalize questions. "Does anyone know X" will often get a couple bites. Jim Keenan specifically mentioned how free he felt to collaborate and ask "dumb" questions of the group. Bill says he's heard it from half a dozen people.

Have one or two status/boasting meetings. Let people discuss what they've done and what they still need to do. Aggregating status and success highlights all the work being done. Showing successes after the hackathon is crucial, both for future energy and future sponsors, so do not neglect this.

People won't use a central wiki unless you keep poking them, and then they'll do it just to stop the poking. Pete wound up taking most of the attendance, and the major portion of the successes page came from Saturday night's meeting. HOWEVER, the Wiki was invaluable in prepping projects and people for the weekend.

It helped having different tables designated, with signs, for which projects they were devoted to. There was a Perl::Critic table and three Parrot tables.

As the day wore on, there was more tendency for people to break into smaller groups.

There was a perception among many before that the hackathon was all Perl 6. We need to make sure that it's understood to be about any Perl project.

A lot of people wound up working on Parrot than we expected. There were six Parrot folks at the start of the hackathon, and fourteen when it was over.

chromatic's oreillynet article

The Perl community is not new to hackathons; the Pugs hackathon in Toronto in 2005 before YAPC::NA is one of the best known. However, most of these sprints took place before or after conferences: OSCON, YAPC, et cetera.

I went to the Chicago Perl Hackathon this past weekend. Barring some troubles during the trip, it went flawlessly.

The organizers, Andy Lester and Pete Krawczyk, found a small hotel in a little town outside of the Chicago suburbs. It was accessible from public transportation, had a small conference room for us, and was within walking distance of a handful of restaurants.

Better yet, we had tables, chairs, wifi, electricity, and snacks.

Though there were a few out of towners (a couple of us from Portland, two from Seattle, a couple of people from California, two from New York City, and one from the UK), most of the attendees were from the midwest. This was a goal, and it was a great help. The total attendance was somewhere around thirty people.

Two projects dominated the event. One was the Perl::Critic project. Several attendeed squashed bugs, refined policies, and improved one of the most useful software development tools I’ve used in years.

The biggest success may have been for the Parrot project, however. Six of the attendees were Parrot contributors before the weekend started (including your author) and by the end of Saturday night, we had added eight more contributors.

I spent the weekend fixing broken tests in Parrot, and had the time to add a couple of new features. (My big goal — fixing Parrot::Embed on non-Unix platforms — didn’t quite happen, but Jerry Gay and I did track down some of the problems.) This cleaning was necessary for Chip Salzenberg (also in attendance) to release Parrot 0.4.7, codename “Caique”. We also took advantage of being in person to discuss some weighty design issues related to our object system. Unfortunately, three of the core Parrot developers couldn’t be there, but we caught up on IRC with Leo Toetsch and Patrick Michaud.

Was it a success? By all means! The best part was sitting down with people who’d never touched Parrot before and walking through adding a new feature or fixing a bug. For example, Jerry and I helped Jim Keenan compile Parrot for the first time. He’d found a bug in our configuration process. Though Jerry and I both recognized the error (being very much too familiar with compiling Parrot), walking Jim through the fix on his own virtually would have taken a lot of time. It went much faster in person, and now Jim is providing patches to related build files.

If you ask any of the other attendees, you’ll hear similar stories – especially, I hope, from people new to a project. A few people dropped by for a few hours without any particular plans, just hoping that they could contribute to something.

To me, that’s the real goal of a hackathon. I’m very proud of the work we’ve done on the Parrot release, but I’m even prouder that we helped eight more people contribute to Parrot. Maybe some of them will never contribute again, and that’s okay. Maybe some of them will continue to produce good patches and even become committers. I’d like that a lot.

However, each of them tried something new and contributed to a project that’s bigger than any single person. All of the developers of the project are better for their work, and all of the current and future users of the project benefit too. You can, of course, start to contribute to almost any free software project without ever leaving your house, but if it takes flying halfway across the country in wild weather and giving up a weekend every now and then to help someone else make that jump, I think it’s well worth it.

TPF, how about a west coast hackathon sometime early next year? Portland’s nice.

Andy & Pete: Thanks again for your efforts in organizing the Chicago Perl Hackathon. When you get a chance, I'd like to learn more about the financial costs of putting the hackathon on. I'd like to help organize one in the Northeast but will need to know the cost structure first.

Jim Keenan

contributed by Jim Keenan on Dec 10 5:55pm

This is the home page wiki for Hackathon Chicago, Nov 10-12, 2006. The static website is at http://hackathon.info

Did you write about the Hackathon?

If you wrote about the hackathon, or posted pictures, please post them on the reporting page.

Lessons learned from this Hackathon

Pete and Andy and a bunch of other people wrote up this post-hackathon recap.

Please add your advice for future Hackathon attendees to the Hackathon Attendees HOWTO.

The Perl-ish people -- who we are

• The attendees list is as complete as it can be. Make it more complete if you can.

The Perl-ish work -- what we do; what we did!

• The projects are the reason for coming
• Hackers: add your name to a project.
• Leaders: add a project to the list.
• If you're looking for a project, then highlight your skills so that project leaders can find you.
• Our successes for the weekend!
• Other notable events from the weekend.
• Leave your feedback here.

Communications (human, email, and computer)

• Andy Lester's cell: 815-245-1738
• Pete Krawczyk's cell: 815-260-8654
• Country Inn & Suites: 815-477-3500 (contact: Sharon in sales)
• Add to the Tech Needs page if you think the group may need it but not have it.
• The hackathon-chicago mailing list will be used to make announcements and hold discussions. Subscribe and monitor it.
• The Hotel wireless will connect us to the internet. (If you're non-wireless, please add your name to the Tech Needs page.)
• IRC channel: irc://irc.perl.org/hackathon

Hackathon logistics

• The Todo list tracks organizational tasks. Add your name if you can help out.

Transportation

• The Arrival Schedule will help coordinate transportation. Make a note if you'll need a ride to the hotel from either the Holiday Inn (van Galder bus drop-off point) or the Pingree Road (not the Crystal Lake) Metra station. The hotel will pick you up on Friday; Pete and Andy will do so other times. Please make it easy for them to schedule their time by signing up; they can't read minds.
• Use the Departure Schedule if you'd like to coordinate your leaving.

Lodging, Food, and Meeting space

• Country Inn & Suites is the place we're doing this. There's a special rate.
• Pete and Andy are going to get lots of snacks 'n' food 'n' stuff for hacking. Make specific requests, we'll do what we can.
• There is food nearby for meals.

Attendees

	Who	Fri	Sat	Sun	From Where	Online
A	David Adler (dha)	√	√	√	New York	dha on irc.perl.org
B	Jess Balint	X?	X	X?	Chicago	jessb5760
C	chromatic		√	√ !	Portland, OR
	Jason Carter		√ !		Crystal Lake, IL
	Jason Crome		√	√	DeKalb, IL	TheOneCromeDome
D	Richard Dice	√	√	√ !	Toronto, ON
	Matt Diephouse	√	√	X	Ann Arbor, MI
	Chris Dolan		√		Madison, WI
	Clyde Forrester		X		Forest Park, IL
F	Mike Fragassi		X		Chicago
G	Jerry Gay	√	√	√	Seattle, WA	mikethepod
	Patty Giorgas	X			Chicago
	Ryan Gerry		√	X	McHenry, IL
	Jason Gessner				Milwaukee, WI
H	Todd Hepler	√	X	X	St. Louis, MO
I	Kelli Ireland	√	√		Pittsburgh, PA	kelli3125
J	Andrew Johnson	?	√		Downers Grove, IL
	Kirsten Jones	√	√	√	Scotts Valley, CA	synedra@mac.com
K	Jim Keenan	√	√	√	Brooklyn, NY	irc.perl.org: kid51
	Pete Krawczyk	√	√	√	Wonder Lake, IL	pkrawczy
	Ken Krugler		√		Silicon Valley, CA
L	Andy Lester	√	√	√	McHenry, IL	petdance
	Doug Lim	X	√	X	Schaumburg, IL	dlim60194 doug_lim.rm
M	Josh McAdams		√	X	Chicago, IL
	John Melesky	√ !	X		Chicago, IL	phaedrusdeinus
	Adnan Menon	X			Chicago
O	Bill Odom	√	√	√	St. Louis, MO
P	Steve Peters		X?	X	Madison, WI	fisharerojo
	Pete Prodoehl		√		Milwaukee, WI	pjraster
	Jonathan Rockway	√	√	X	Chicago, IL	irc.perl.org: jrockway
	Andrew Rodland			√	Chicago	irc: hobbs
S	Chip Salzenberg	√	√	√	Jupiter	irc.perl.org: chip GroutNASA
	Michael Schwern	√	√	√	Portland, OR	MichaelSchwern irc.perl.org:Schwern
	Rick Scott	√	√	√	Sault Ste Marie, ON	irc.perl.org:shadowspar
	Elliot Shank	√	√	√	Chicago, IL	elliotshank
	Mark W. "catfood" Schumann		X	X	Cleveland, OH
	Vishal Soni	X	X	X	Minneapolis, MN
	Michael Stemle	√	√	X	Chicago, IL	irc.perl.org:manchicken mannhuhn
	Ken Swanson	√	X		St. Louis, MO
T	Al Tobey				Grand Rapids, MI	Tobert42
W	Michael R. Wolf	√	√	√	Seattle, WA
	Jonathan Worthington	√	√	√	Scarborough, England	irc.perl.org: jonathan

√ marks people who have arrived.

(Please keep this in alphabetical order)

Thinking of bringing a spouse or kids? Get some idea about what's around from the Hacker Widows and Hacker Orphans pages.

Leader: Andy Lester

Socialtext Open is the software on which this wiki runs. A list of tasks is available on the Socialtext Open development page at the Socialtext Open Source Software wiki.

Kelli Ireland had a crazy idea and suggested that a wiki should include flow charting capabilities. Then one could click on a flow chart box or arrow and go to the page that expands on that topic/action/etc.

Chris Fedde is just experementing to see if this is something that could replace our current Kwiki incantation.

I want a form feature that lets people add and edit semi-structured text.

Reporting live from the scene of the Chicago hackathon!

• chromatic's writeup for the O'Reilly Network
• http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/pushing_the_caique_out_the_doo.html
• Pete Prodoehl's photos on Flickr
• http://flickr.com/photos/raster/tags/hackathon/
• dha's photos
• http://flickr.com/photos/ptmpsiat/tags/hackathon/
• Andy Lester's TPF column about the hackathon
• http://news.perl-foundation.org/2006/11/chicago_perl_hackathon_a_rousi.html
• Jonathan Worthington went back home to England and proposed a European hackathon
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/maddingue/311975109/in/photostream/

Leave your comments and feedback about the hackathon here. Please use the Comment button instead of editing the page.

Andy should have made it clear that O'Hare was the airport of choice, not Midway. The people who came in to Midway had to go through hell.

contributed by Andy Lester on Nov 11 8:30am

No, just the Chicago suburbs. I can see how you might confuse the two though.

• chromatic

I made a number of blog posts (Hackathon: Perl::Critic, Hackathon: Parrot, Hackathon: Krugle, Hackathon: Summary…) about the Hackathon. Personally most of the projects being worked on were over my head code-wise, but I still had a good time and learned a lot. Thanks for putting it on. (I've also put photos on Flickr...)

contributed by pete@rasterweb.net

I had fun, even though I only attended for one day. I had intended to work with the Parrot folks to work on their own Perl::Critic tests, but time was too short. In an email to the perl-critic list, I made a brain dump of the non-coding accomplishments and the list was surprisingly long.

I was also surprised that I enjoyed the krugle.com presentation and discussion. Ken Krugler is a thoughtful and interesting guy.

-- Chris Dolan

I enjoyed the weekend. The only thing I would have liked is better organization to get people into projects.

A lot of people seemed to be there and just work on what they wanted to, which was great. But for someone like me--who is experienced in perl but hasn't worked on much in the community--I didn't come in with a set goal in mind. I just wanted to work and give something back. It was kind of hard for me to get going on any particular project.

-Ken Swanson

contributed by kswanson@watson.wustl.edu on Nov 13 5:20pm

I want to pitch in 2 more cents here, in that like Ken, I really wished I could have contributed a bit more to Perl in general. All I really got to do of note is post photos and write blog posts. I did offer my services though, so maybe it was just my lack of skills in certain areas. (Plus I was only there for one day.)

contributed by pete@rasterweb.net on 2006-11-14

Pete, I don't want to pick on you (no offense intended!), but I have to speak from the other side a little bit. When you approached me on Saturday, I explained to you what Perl::Critic was and what Michael and I were working on, but you never even sat down with us to look at some code. While I do agree strongly that project leaders should have been more proactive about recruiting help, I also think that the newcomers have to be proactive about getting their hands dirty in code.
-- Chris Dolan

I could be wrong about my recollection here (you know how I am with matching faces and names, and even if it's not Pete, it was someone else that this still applies to), but I think that Pete sat down with Chris, and was intimidated by the scope of the project.

Maybe what we need to do is ease the new people into it. On the Parrot side, there are a lot of stories of "Bob installed Parrot successfully the first time." Maybe that's what we do with brand new people. "Here, go install Perl::Critic, and run it on a project of yours, so you get a feel for what it does."

contributed by Andy Lester on Nov 15 9:47am

This is the place to list what your projects have achieved. Maybe it's not even a project, but someone you met, or a hallway conversation you had. List it here!

Perl 6 & Parrot

• Fixed a bunch of sprintf test failures
• Put error checking on the Configure.pl script
• Added a new Forth implementation to the repo
• Fixed various namespace issues with Tcl
• Fixed the coding standard test failures
• Autogenerated more information for coding standard tests
• Fixed runinterp_p_p not to throw warnings
• Several new parrot hackers minted.
• Used the existence of a patent on the C# API to convince chip not to write a C# compiler for Parrot
• Discussed object/pmcs
• Removed python ops
• Implemented a large part of the new bytecode spec, including working towards packfiles being garbage collectable and introspectable
• Wrote the beginnings of a PIR grammer (for PGE)

ATestForEveryBug

HTML::Tidy

• Jonathan Rockway merged down a bunch of stuff from his development branch, and Andy Lester released it.

Perl::Critic

• Two new committers on Perl::Critic
• Michael Wolf worked with Chris on two new policies. Did his first SVN commit ever.
• Elliot Shank committed his first policy
• Met Chris & other folks
• Four new policies created, several bugs fixed
• Established relationship w/Ken Krugler.

KillTrac

PITA

Jifty Backend Abstraction

• Wrote a modelless Jifty app (Sifty)

Filterless subroutine prototypes

• Got B::Generate and optimizer working again which are necessary to figure out how types and typesafety do their prototype hacking magic.

ack

• Released a new version of File::Next to support a --sort flag in ack.
• Released a new version of ack that includes an option to recreate itself as a standalone script you can put in your ~/bin.
• Increased test coverage on ack.

Socialtext Open

HTML::Tree

• Pete Krawczyk has been blowing through the bug queue, some over 3 years.
• Unicode is better.
• Two new versions released during the hackathon, 3.22 and 3.23.

Anything else

Saturday Status/Sucess Report

On Saturday evening, just before a huge stack of huge Chicago pizzas arrived, we reported on our sucesses. here's the notes (as transcribed by Michael R. Wolf) from that meeting. Please modify, amplify, and correct as necessary.

Perl::Critic

• 2 new Perl::Critic committers (Michael and Elliot)
• 2 new policies.

Chris Dolan & Michael Wolf

• Pair coded new policy (Editor::RequireEmacsFileVariables)
• Started new policy (ProhibitListProcessingSideEffects) to notice when map, grep, or first are used to change $_.

Elliot Shank

• Created new policy: ProhibitMagicNumbers

Andy Lester

• Ran perlcritic (plus own modifications) extensively on socialtext.
• Updated Perl::Critic TODO list based on use cases

Parrot

General

• "Parrot metastasized through the room"
• Chip was so busy fielding interruptions from folks that were eager to help that he didn't originally get time to do his own work. He was thrilled!!!
• Lots of tests were fixed. As of midnight, the bug count was down to 2 from 70+ (or 50+) earlier this week.
• The face-to-face interactions severely cut the round-trip time from question to answer to action. Significantly. Question to action was minutes, not days.
• 8 folks did their first work on Parrot on Saturday. The day started with 6 and ended with 14 Parrot folks.
• Some folks did their first successful parrot download, update and edits

Ken

• created code to automate the PMC list, a formerly manual

(i.e. error-prone and onerous) process.

Andrew

• Did some digital ditch digging by standardizing some C code to use the the variable 'interp' instead of its multitude of different spellings.

Mike S

• Ran cygwin tests. Studied threads. Exported symbols.

John Beckman

• Created FORTH test suite to exercise the "ANSI FORTH standard", a phrase that Chip spoke to a tittering crowd. "Each word of the phrase is successively surprising".

Josh

• Got Perl to compile

Jim Keenan

• Pmc2c.pl, testing. "Successfully used Phalanx principles."
• Learned a CPAN config workaround from Schwern that had eluded him (and a thread on Perl Monks) for over a year.
• GMP build on iBook workaround while working on Parrot. Triggered question through Chip that was resolved by DHA.

David Adler

• Coded workaround to bad options

Matt

• Tcl compiler improvements
• Shined some light into some dark corners
• Added new language to Parrot: FORTH

Jonathan

• New byte format
• Created Parrot grammar for Parrot

Kelli

• Packfile introspection
• Wrote C code

Rick Scott

• Removed dead link in docs.
• Reworking test code to place temporary files in consistent locations.
• Made Parrot's test harness use -D40 (initialize registers with random garbage).

Other Projects

Pete

• Cleared bugs from the HTML::Tree package, some of which were 3+ years old, and had survived the reign of multiple package owners.
• Some Unicode and UTF8 characters were duplicated. No longer. There's now "much better Unicoding".

Andy Lester

• Worked on ack: updating ack, file next. there's a new (non-cpan, non-perl-related) home page petdance.com/ack. Can now download as a script for ~/bin directory. Crushes all dependencies. Viral marketing for cpan-phobic and perl-phobic folks, whe will later learn that 'ack' is possible because of the power of both. But they don't need to know that just yet.

Michael Schwern

• Worked on crush.

Clyde

• Installed and documented Perl installation via ActiveState and cygwin so that he can help folks in future.

Kirsten

• Abstracted REST back end to Jifty. Made web services back end where only a DB backend was previously possible. Proof of concept. Took a rigid DBI-centric model, and flexed it to accomodate new interfaces. (Nobody said the /R[aeiou]{2}ls/ word, nor mentioned a gem stone. Jifty is Jifty, not "like" something else.)

Todd Hepler

• made some progress on a custom Moose metaclass for "tracked" objects, with help from #moose

It's Tuesday, and I'm just now recovering from this past weekend, hosting the first standalone Perl Hackathon here in the Chicago area. It's all worth it, though, because by all accounts this hackathon was a smashing success, and I couldn't be happier.

When I first proposed the idea of a standalone hackathon, it was met with guarded optimism from the Perl Foundation steering committee. We thought about what goals we'd set, and decided that with something so new, we'd be foolish to set ourselves up for disappointment. I suckered veteran YAPC::NA 2006 organizer Pete Krawczyk into helping pull things together, and our planning was underway.

Fast forward to early November 2006. We had everything in order, already had a good number of sign-ups at first, and they kept on showing up. We had set up a page on the hackathon wiki for attendees to sign up, and the number of
I decided to It went better than I expected, although for a first time hackathon, I would have been happy if three people showed up. Instead, we had about 15 on Friday, 30 on Saturday, and 15 on Sunday.

It wasn't all about the number of people, either.

This is a running log of notable events from the weekend.

Thursday night, Michael Schwern aquires pink monkey banana toe socks.

Friday, 8:56, Jerry Gay tries to make a waffle but neglects to prime the iron with non-stick spray. Resulting waffle sustains massive structural damage.

contributed by Andy Lester on Nov 10 6:58am

Friday, 14:03, Andy's self-adhesive label machine is a hit. Every geek gathering should have one.

contributed by Andy Lester on Nov 10 12:05pm

Friday, 16:24, Power goes out for the fourth time. We all love our laptops.

contributed by chip@pobox.com on Nov 10 8:25am

Now the fifth time. Desk clerk says that ComEd is doing power work down the road.

contributed by Andy Lester on Nov 10 2:40pm

Power is back on after six outages, and has been on for 10 minutes. As Bill said, next year's Hackathon should be held in Fiji.

contributed by Pete Krawczyk on Nov 10 3:13pm

Friday afternoon, Michael Schwern acquires pink monkey banana pajamas.

contributed by rakudo@shadowspar.dyndns.org on Nov 10 3:31pm

Friday evening, beer-augmented hacking begins an era of quieter and convivial productivity.

contributed by particle on Nov 10 9:16pm

Saturday, 2am, Andy picks up chromatic from the Metra station, ending his 14-hour trip from Portland.

contributed by Andy Lester on Nov 11 12:08am

Sunday evening, remaining hackathoners make the trek to downtown Crystal Lake in search of a restaurant that serves Italian food or something that looks vaguely like a vegetable. Finding all businesses shuttered and all sidewalks rolled up, they return to the hotel and resign themselves to eating grease and sugar at Culver's.

Tuesday, chromatic writes up a lovely recap of the weekend: http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/pushing_the_caique_out_the_doo.html

contributed by Andy Lester on Nov 14 7:04pm