.Astronomy Day 3: Hack! December 5, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, dotastronomy, me , trackback
Hackers in action
One of the things we decided early on in the organisation for .Astronomy is that we wanted to set aside an entire day that was not in any way scheduled. We’d call it a Hack Day and just let people decide for themselves what they wanted to work on. The Lorentz Center is the perfect location for this: plenty of rooms and offices of a variety of sizes, a large common room with on-demand caffeinated and sugary stuff, and decent wifi throughout the building. But I admit that I was a little worried about Hack Day. What if people didn’t get it? What if they just saw this as a midweek day off and didn’t come? What if they expected more organisation? I had no idea if this would work.
In reality, it worked out better than I’d ever imagined. Everyone seemed to find something and someone they were interested in, and teamed up to work on some fun and exciting ideas that I hope to hear more about in the weekd to come.
As the halls filled with debates over the relative merits of Rails over Perl, it was pretty obvious from the outset that my technical skills just wouldn’t cut it here. I’m not used to feeling technically inept – but there you go. So I spent the afternoon writing text for one of the projects with Amanda, Chris, Michael and a few others. I’ve never “collaborated” on text and that too was an interesting experience, greatly helped by having clever collaborative software that didn’t require me to talk – which generally I didn’t do very well this week. Why talk when you can write? I’m starting to discover that as a “pipeline” for processing my thoughts into meaning, my hands are far more effective than my voice.
The nifty little tool we used was EtherPad, and it was perfect for writing text with several authors. Much to our disgust, Google subsequently bought up AppJet and shut down EtherPad that very same day. Bastards.
I’ll leave you with a very nice little video made by Markus Pössel from Heidelberg during the Hack Day. The video and the conference were also featured on Universe Today.
Image: Rob Hollow
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