The Pathedral and the Kazoo

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.

 

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

• the LibreOffice Conference at Milano from 2013-09-24 to 2013-09-27
• the LibreOffice Hackfest Freiburg from 2013-11-01 to 2013-11-03

See you then, and Happy Hacking on LibreOffice!

 

This week Hamburg was blessed with exceptionally good weather, blue sky, sunny, 25 to 30 degrees Celsius, it would had been a shame to stay inside all days so I decided to at least partly work outside outdoor "open air" with a mobile internet connection and hack on LibreOffice. These were my hacker spaces on Thursday:

Set up my hammock in the meadows of lake Alster, Alsterwiesen.

The Sun is approaching the hammock and I'm preparing to move to a place where I can continue to be able to recognize what's displayed on the monitor.

Actually working with a notebook in a hammock is not ergonomic at all.. it was fun this time, but I wouldn't make it a habit, probably not even repeat. Hammocks are great to relax and read, but with a notebook either the arms aren't in the right angle or aren't free to move or the notebook hasn't the right angle or the neck gets stiff. Or all together.

In the late afternoon there's a nice shady place on the roof of my home.

 

Life can be great :-)

 

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.

I'm going to the LibreOffice Hamburg Hackfest on April 14/15, what about you?

Meet the guys and gals and hack away your favorite itch.