Philippe Bruhat (BooK) said:
Hi,
As the main organizer of the next Perl QA Hackathon in Lyon (the venue is
here: http://goo.gl/maps/mXo15), I would like to collect some feedback on
the hackathon that we just came back from, in Lancaster.
Great! ^^
I would like to collect your impressions about what worked and what
didn't, what was missing, what you want for next year (including dates,
but know it's going to be a Friday-Sunday hackathon). You can reply in
public or in private. I already wrote down all the things I liked from
this year, as the team has set the bar quite high already. :-)
Here's my public feedback.
I've been to two QA hackathons, and this one was by far the best one! :)
Here are the good bits (please keep):
+ I loved the food
+ The fact that so many came
+ The discussions and stories and gossip :)
+ Having a working wireless network
+ The consensus sessions
+ Lancaster
+ Good to get an info folder
+ Useful to have phone #'s on the attendee badge
+ The coffee was very enjoyable
Here are the bits that would be nice to improve at the next hackathon:
- More than one room for hacking? The main room we had was packed.
- 16h access to venue would be nice (not 10/8h). Hacking at the pub wasn't
too bad though.
- Standup-meetings at the end of the day would be nice to have. I would
have loved to hear what people were up to.
- An optional hackathon commercial support ticket price would have been
nice. Some businesses have budgets for training but not sponsorship.
Here are a few ideas maybe worth trying out:
+ Have the hackathon on thu/fri/sat/sun (one additional day), to make it
easier for attendees who can't spend weekends hacking but would like to
come anyway.
+ Move hackathon dates to a few weeks earlier, so attendees can submit
hackathon-relevant talks to YAPC and other conferences before deadlines.
+ Make an effort to invite people for external (non-Perl) communities.
Examples might include: Distro vendors; Packaging experts; People in the
TAP community (See the tap-l IETF mailing list).
+ Set one lofty coding-related goal for the hackathon, with intention that
"everyone" can help make it happen, and with a list of tasks anyone
(even new attendees) can work on.
The goal is to add a bunch of bullet points to our work document, so that
we can start early on making the next QA hackathon even more productive
and useful.
Hope that my comments help somehow.
- Salve, who enjoyed the hackathon a lot
--
#!/usr/bin/perl
sub AUTOLOAD{$AUTOLOAD=~/.*::(\d+)/;seek(DATA,$1,0);print# Salve Joshua Nilsen
getc DATA}$"="'};&{'";@_=unpack("C*",unpack("u*",':4@,$'.# <s...@foo.no>
'2!--"5-(50P%$PL,!0X354UC-PP%/0\`'."\n"));eval "&{'@_'}"; __END__ is near! :)
