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LibreOffice Hackfest at Hamburg

Thanks to CIB, who sponsored the event with their office location, drinks and food, we again had a LibreOffice Hackfest at Hamburg on Saturday/Sunday October 24/25, and a get-together on Friday evening with the opportunity to meet also some long time colleagues from Sun and Star.

My timeline:

  • followed a nice introduction to the help authoring extension held by Regina Henschel, for how to install and use it see the documentation in the wiki
  • changed our own implementation of rtl_math_{erf,erfc} to follow the C++11 standard's specification for input of Inf and NaN
  • added unit tests for rtl_math_{erf,erfc,expm1,log1p}
  • replaced implementation of rtl_math_{erf,erfc} with ::std::{erf,erfc}
  • attended a Gerrit inline editing introduction by David Ostrovsky (yet another time his favorite feature ;)
  • replaced implementation of rtl_math_{expm1,log1p} with ::std::{expm1,log1p}
  • dug with Regina into the help authoring extension to spot a place for switching the license text written based on the difference between existing and new file, but the convoluted agglomeration of template, fields, Basic and XSLT and the license text being an XML comment in .xhp didn't offer a quick and easy to spot solution, Kendy please take over ;)

But, as usual no new hacker was interested in diving into Calc core code.. maybe you at one of the next Hackfests?

See also the other achievements.

Last but not least, the important event of ordering pizza online:

The not to be underestimated event of ordering pizza online.
The not to be underestimated event of ordering pizza online.

For more and better pictures see Björn on G+

 

LibreOffice Hackfest at Las Palmas, Gran Canaria

Another retrospective..

On April 24 and 25 we had a LibreOffice Hackfest at Las Palmas, Gran Canaria at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) in it's IT faculty building. Due to the geographical distance for some community members understandably a little bit less frequented than other hackfests in the past, but nevertheless of course great fun for the participants. And an even bigger opportunity to introduce LibreOffice and Free Software development to the local IT students, as the dean of the IT faculty Fran Santana was very enthusiastic about this event and helpfully provided rooms, equipment and personnel and invited interested students to attend our talks.

LibreOffice Hackfest Las Palmas 2014 flyer
Flyer with LibreOffice talks program and hackfest announcement.

On Thursday we had introductory talks with about 20-30 listeners. Not that many, but given that it was a week of exams not a bad number either, whoever took an exam on that day wasn't attending and whoever did not take an exam probably was reading for an examination instead ... in fact it was very quiet in the building.
All talks were streamed live and recorded and are available on YouTube as a 1h30 video. Thanks to Jorge Castellano of ULPGC.

I noticed some shyness in the audience.. how can we, as a large project, bridge the gap and attract young fellow hackers who aren't that experienced and maybe didn't get in contact with a Free Software project yet? Anyhow, four students showed up during the days, all were interested in how to contribute something in Python. Apparently Python is quite popular.. so there's room for writing API unit tests, contribute to server infrastructure and some.

There's a list of achievements in the wiki, but no less important is the community building process. I'd like to see more local events to spread the word and attract interested developers, especially C++ hackers of course who'd like to work on application code. The next LibreOffice Hackfest will be at Paris, on June 27-28.

Concentrated hacking atmosphere.
Concentrated hacking atmosphere.

Alberto Ruiz from Red Hat with the dean of the IT faculty at ULPGC and LibreOffice hackers.
Alberto Ruiz from Red Hat with Fran Santana, the dean of the IT faculty at ULPGC, and LibreOffice hackers.

A special Thank You goes to Alberto Ruiz from Red Hat, who himself studied at the very same university, and Fran Santana, the dean of the IT faculty at ULPGC, who both collaborated closely to make all this happen. Fran's dedication and commitment in hosting this hackfest made it a great success. And of course a Thank You to the city of Las Palmas for choosing and using LibreOffice, which triggered the initial idea of having a hackfest at Las Palmas and lead to a great stay. We should do this again :-)

 

LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest Retrospective

So the weekend before we had the LibreOffice Hackfest in Hamburg, a roundup of 22-24 LibreOffice developers exchanging ideas, hacking on things, fixing bugs and having fun, Club-Mate, cola, beer, pizza, börek, bread rolls and strawberries.

This time we even had not only participants from different countries but also different continents, as 5 devs from the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia were present. KACST recently joined The Document Foundation's Advisory Board and sponsors the Saudi Arabian National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies.

Friday evening we started with the socializing event ...

... at the Schach-Café (chess café)

These previous three images and the next one are embedded from Miklos' Flickr album.

 

Saturday and Sunday then we met at the Attraktor Makerspace (site in German) for the actual hacking to take place.

After quite a short Saturday night for a few ...

... we ignored Sunday's sunshine and continued.

Space and people.
Space and people.
The KACST group.
The KACST group.
David thinks I'd photograph him.
David thinks I'd photograph him.
Yes, that is a working Star Trek pinball machine!
Yes, that is a working Star Trek pinball machine!

 

The overall achievements are captured on the Hackfest's wiki page, in summary among others we

  • fixed at least 8 bugs
  • implemented 2-3 features
  • made the French Bug Submission Assistant (BSA) go ready for production
  • worked on Java unit test to Python migration
  • bootstrapped two new tinderboxes for Windows builds
  • did lots of small things
  • last but not least, socialized with known and new people

You missed it? Or want to join (again)? The next opportunities will be

See you then, and Happy Hacking on LibreOffice!

 

LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest 2012

Thorsten already summarized it very well and even Björn survived it, the LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest 2012 was a great success, 25-30 participants hacking, building, exchanging ideas, having fun, too little sleep and Italo's pasta.

So let me just add that with the help of moggi I learned how to add a new file type's (here CSV) filter test to Calc's unit tests in order to prevent regressions in the CSV import filter that I lately changed to some extent and finished polishing at the Hackfest.

Many thanks to co-organizers Thorsten and Björn and of course all who joined and participated and made the Hackfest such a great event. We'll definitely have to do this again.