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2006 OpenBSD Hackathon Well Underway

Posted by ryuzaki0 on

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap is running a two part who's who at the 2006 OpenBSD Hackathon. Starting on the 27th and running for a full week, developers get together and concentrate on communication rather than just development. Project leader Theo de Raadt was quoted as saying 'I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.'"

24 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. you're not alone doing this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Theo de Raadt was quoted as saying 'I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.'

    For just one project that does this often, see http://plone.org/events/sprints

  2. Re:Yeah. by Roody+Blashes · · Score: 3, Funny

    I guess that says something about some of the developers around here....

    I gotta say, the AC has a point. I spend 50-60 hours a week writing code because, uh, that's what I'm paid to do.

    --
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  3. Pfft! A week?!? by OmegaBlac · · Score: 5, Funny
    Project leader Theo de Raadt was quoted as saying 'I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.
    Tell that too the EA developers!
  4. Axes? by TheDreadSlashdotterD · · Score: 2, Funny

    Is this where the techie fight clubs use axes for a day?

    --
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  5. Re:No one else does an -athon? by Toba82 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's not the point - what he was saying is that no other free software project actually has a meetup where they code in a setting that is, frankly, what closed source companies use 100% of the time.

    --
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  6. Re:Yeah. by OECD · · Score: 3, Funny

    'I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.'"

    WTF? What the hell are they doing, then? JFC, it must be fscking nice... No Karma points for them. Bad developers! Bad! *smacks nose with newspaper*

    --
    One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
  7. Re:Yeah. by twistah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Look up the word "volunteer" in the dictionary.

  8. Re:I like OpenBSD and all, but... by Nimrangul · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, a sprint is shorter than a hackathon and tends to be run by significantly smaller projects than a full operating systems. Something insignificant like pypy or the like does a sprint, infact that's how most of their development is done, two day sprints all the time.

    --
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  9. Re:No one else does an -athon? by OmegaBlac · · Score: 2, Informative

    Debian developers do this. It may not be a week at a time but several weekends a year and it eventually evens out.

    http://wiki.debian.org/BSPMarathon

  10. WTF? Contradiction in the Summary! by pgpckt · · Score: 4, Funny

    KernelTrap is running a two part who's who at the 2006 OpenBSD Hackathon. Starting on the 27th and running for a full week, developers get together and concentrate on communication rather than just development. Project leader Theo de Raadt was quoted as saying 'I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.'"

    --
    Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
    1. Re:WTF? Contradiction in the Summary! by nacturation · · Score: 2

      Obviously de Raadt didn't write the former. He was quoted as saying the latter. But development isn't just shutting your mouth and coding -- if you run into a snag, it's easiest when you can go and talk to the person whose part you're trying to interface with or get help from others who have overcome those obstacles rather than having to send an email across various timezones, wait for a response, etc. Having everyone there just in case of such issues leads to more development being done which is, after all, the primary purpose.

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  11. Re:Yeah. by gbobeck · · Score: 4, Funny
    > I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.

    Yes, that would be called doing your job.


    Yeah... and some people also call that **College**
    --
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  12. How is this useful? by cperciva · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've never been to an OpenBSD Hackathon, but I really don't understand how this is the best way to use their time together. Surely the advantage of getting everybody into a room together is to allow them to talk to each other more easily, not to allow them to all stare at their terminals and ignore each other.

    When FreeBSD developer summits occur (e.g., at the recent BSDCan), there is always some important hacking done, but the most useful result of the devsummit is that people can talk to each other and make decisions about where the project should going next (e.g., dropping support for Alpha, working more on embedded/arm support, et cetera). Clearly we're missing something important -- can someone more familiar with OpenBSD tell me what the ingredient is in Theo's Magic Kool-Aid which makes developers better at hacking code when they all get together in a single room?

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
    1. Re:How is this useful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I've never been to an OpenBSD hackathon either, but I think the theory is that when you are coding, you often might run into a problem where you'd like to consult someone else, and at the hackathon, an expert is right at the next table. No need to worry about lag from email/IM waiting for a response while another person has gone away for the day, or lives in a different time-zone, is busy working at their day-job, etc, etc.

    2. Re:How is this useful? by RazzleDazzle · · Score: 4, Informative

      There are no "project decisions" to be discussed and made. Theo is the owner of the project, if you want to debate with him on the merits of his choices for the project, he will likely listen to what you have to say as long as it is reasonable to him.

      As an analogy imagine if you were part of a team creating a car. Each person in the team is worked on just part of the car.
      Person 1 says, "I like engines so I am going to work on engine development."
      Person 2 says, "I like tires so I am going to work on tires and wheels."
      Person 3 says, "I like safety features so I am going to work on safety."
      etc.

      Now imagine all of these people working on their respective components but in different countries around the world, completely independent of the rest, it could be difficult to ensure proper integration and compatability. Yes they chat, e-mail, etc but when many people are side by side it is much easier to discuss problems you are facing, either design issues, implementaion issues or whatever. Plus, you get to be around a lot of dialogue and discussions that could help enlighten you to other methods or ways of doing things better.

      This could just be an oversimplification, but if you work directly with a lot of cool and fun people you admire and are admired by, let's face it, it probably is a lot more fun and productive. It is a team effort of people that like what they are doing and want to do it all lead by captain TdR. Plus I imagine there is some Humppa playing there as well?

      Note: I am no developer nor have I ever been to an OpenBSD hackathon.

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  13. What about DebConf? by Roblimo · · Score: 5, Informative

    It seems to me that two weeks ago I was in Mexico at DebConf, which if you look at the official page, was preceded by a weeklong "DebCamp" that could just as easily been called a "hackathon," not to mention that probably 60% or more of the average attendee's time during the "main" DebConf week was spent in collaborative hacking. And DebConf had around 250 people there...

    I'm not knocking OpenBSD's hackathon, just pointing out that it's hardly unique. Many other FOSS projects have similar gatherings.

    1. Re:What about DebConf? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah but OpenBSD hackathons usually produce things of great value. Others are just a communal handjob.

  14. Meet the Hackathon by rbrander · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the second time (and we're hoping for an annual tradition) the Hackathon has agreed to come up for air long enough to give a talk to the Calgary Unix Users Group.

    This year, Bob Beck and Reyk Floeter will give a talk to the group and many Hackathon participants on their directions in wireless chipset support, advanced feature support, and security support.

    At SAIT, June 1, 6PM - all details at

    http://www.cuug.ab.ca/

    1. Re:Meet the Hackathon by ArbitraryConstant · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I was going to post something here, but it seems half the board has already beaten me to it...

      I'm looking forward to it, they had some pretty sweet demos last time. For example, to demonstrate the firewall failover capabilities, they played music on a network mount that was behind a firewall. When they shut down the primary firewall node, the music didn't even skip as the backup took over.

      --
      I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
  15. Re:heh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I found it interesting that so many of the OpenBSD developers started off working with Linux (that some come from the other BSD's is hardly a surprise considering OpenBSD's origin). It seemed they were motivated as much by being disenchanted with Linux code quality (and documentation) as they were captivated by OpenBSD. It begs the question as to whether Linux really needs tighter integration and stricter controls on key libraries, utilities, etc. now that it has become a mainstream OS so far from its hobby beginnings. You could dismiss them all as malcontents, but I'm beginning to wonder (by numbers and lingering rumours) if there is something to these criticisms.

  16. Contradictions in the story? by jemfinch · · Score: 2, Funny

    Let's take a closer look...

    First, we have the story submitter saying this: "developers get together and concentrate on communication rather than just development."

    And then we have Theo saying this: "developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development."

    Hmm...

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  17. Re:Yeah. by Nimrangul · · Score: 2, Insightful

    He said it because it's what open source developers are you dipshit, they volunteer their time to develop a free piece of software, the only one of them that is consistantly making a living through OpenBSD is de Raadt, and he lives and breaths OpenBSD. Perhaps you should be reading a different section of Slashdot, so as to not confuse you with these complex concepts.

    --
    I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
  18. Re:Suspending "Lives" of some of these developers. by dmiller · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nice work trimming out the ones from other countries.

  19. Re:I like OpenBSD and all, but... by Johnny+deBris · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, PyPy sprints can last more than a day or two, iirc the longest was 6 or 7 days. Same for Zope and other Python projects: week-long sprints are uncommon, but they do happen. Also, I wonder whether this has anything to do with significance... I think hackathons and sprints are basically the same thing, just different words for similar gatherings in different communities.