NOLA Hackathon 2011

The New Orleans Hackathon 2011 is an opportunity for MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia operations engineers to come together to work on advancing Wikimedia's tools and infrastructure, focusing on Wikimedia Labs (starting with the dev-ops virtualization cluster), and to train and to squash bugs.

The theme of this event: "the infrastructure of innovation". We're going to improve and discuss the Wikimedia Labs projects infrastructure and other stuff that makes it easier for anyone to supercharge Wikimedia with awesomeness. We're going to work on our gadgets/extensions/tools support, authorization/authentication strategy, dev-ops virtualization, and general training and hacking.

It's mostly going to be dev sprints and bugsmashing, with some discussion and workshops. The event is open to anyone who wants to come and contribute, and is an opportunity to spend time with senior MediaWiki developers & ops engineers, write beautiful code, and learn about the latest developments.

This event will occur in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 14-16 October 2011.

Venue
Launch Pad, a collaborative workspace in New Orleans.

Directions
Launchpad has directions listed on their site. It is located in the IP building at the corner of Magazine St. and Girod St.. All hotels listed above are within walking distance. All hotels are also in walking distance of most of the attractions of the city.

Schedule

 * Friday
 * Start time at 5 PM
 * End time 10 PM?
 * Saturday
 * Start some time early in the morning - undecided for now
 * Erik Moeller gives opening talk
 * Roan Kattouw on "Intro to MediaWiki Hacking" in the early afternoon - a lecture and workshop on MediaWiki's overall architecture and ways to mod it, from site preferences to gadgets to extensions. Attendees will learn how to customize MediaWiki using CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.
 * Start time 10 AM
 * End time 6 PM
 * Sunday
 * Start time 10 AM
 * Chad Horohoe's testing training - a lecture on how to write tests, walking attendees through the documentation and teaching them how to run tests.   (Tentatively scheduled for Sunday morning.)
 * "I'll find a simple function we still need a test for, and use it as an example. I'll briefly touch on setting up phpunit (with the caveat that *sometimes* it's harder than it should be, so ask if you need extra help). Then dive into how to write the test."


 * Brion Vibber's git training:
 * I've volunteered to do a quick intro-to-our-scary-git-future session at the New Orleans hackathon; I'll see if I can lay out a nice workflow demonstration from a few different perspectives:


 * * staff or very active volunteer developer who's doing a lot of core or high-priority extension work all the time
 * * reviewers monitoring incoming stuff
 * * extension maintainers working on their own and sharing their code
 * * ad-hoc patch submissions
 * * larger feature/refactoring submissions
 * * batch updates such as localization maintainers
 * * deployment branch management
 * * using the VCS as a deployment source
 * * how things can interact with Bugzilla etc


 * End time 6 PM?

Attendees

 * Ben Hartshorne
 * Brion Vibber
 * Chad
 * DJ Bauch
 * Eloquence
 * Mark Hershberger
 * Mark Mims
 * Pyoungmeister
 * Roan Kattouw
 * Rob Halsell
 * RobLa-WMF
 * Ryan Lane
 * Sam Reed
 * Sumana Harihareswara
 * Russ Nelson
 * Max Semenik
 * Mutante
 * Afeldman
 * Gary Anderson
 * Tim Starling
 * CT Woo
 * Kevin Brown
 * Daniel Renfro
 * Leslie Carr
 * Salvatore Ingala
 * Markus Glaser
 * Connor Smith
 * Ben Lobaugh
 * Leisa Fearing tentative
 * Dana Isokawa
 * Add your name here if you're intending to come!

Side programme

 * Sumana proposes: Monday we visit a NOLA haunted house

Topics
Here are the things we want to focus on at the hackathon:


 * Wikimedia Labs (sandbox environment for developers and operations)
 * Code review/code standards training
 * Bugsmash
 * Getting independent MediaWiki vendors to submit their patches upstream
 * Wikia
 * Apache logs bug hunt-n-fix sprint
 * OpenStack Swift sprint
 * authorization & authentication, such as OpenID/oAuth
 * Next-generation Gadgets planning
 * Add your idea here!

2 stars

 * Parc St. Charles
 * Internet (price not listed)
 * [Cotton Exchange Hotel Downtown]
 * Internet complimentary

3 stars

 * St. James Hotel
 * Internet $5 per day
 * Hilton Garden Inn New Orleans Convention Center
 * Internet complimentary
 * Hotel Le Cirque
 * Internet $5 per day
 * Wyndham Garden Hotel Baronne Plaza
 * Internet (possibly complimentary?)
 * Royal St Charles Hotel
 * Internet $9 per day
 * Queen & Crescent Hotel
 * Internet complimentary

4 stars

 * Hilton New Orleans/St. Charles Avenue
 * Internet $13 per day
 * Omni Royal Crescent Hotel
 * Internet $10 per day
 * Renaissance New Orleans Arts Hotel
 * Internet $13 per day

Contact

 * mail: Dana Isokawa disokawa [at] wikimedia.org
 * Panic Phone for emergencies: (only during the event)
 * Program coordination:
 * Logistics: Ryan Lane
 * Assistant: Dana Isokawa