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 below are within walking distance.

Friday
(Etherpad notes archived at NOLA Hackathon/Friday)
 * Start time at 5 PM
 * Introductions, discovering what people want to work on or learn this weekend, setting schedule
 * Dinner brought in to Launch Pad, 7pm
 * After dinner, people hacked at Launch Pad & in hotel lobby (Renaissance New Orleans Arts Hotel)

Saturday

 * Breakfast (beignets and coffee) at Launch Pad at 9:30am
 * Start 10am
 * Erik Moeller gives opening talk, 15 minutes at most ;-)
 * Lunch brought in to Launch Pad, 12:30pm (Thai, with meat, vegan, & vegetarian options)
 * Afternoon: Roan Kattouw on "Intro to MediaWiki Hacking". 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.
 * End time 6 PM
 * Group dinner 6:30pm, Grand Isle Restaurant
 * After dinner, more hacking at Launch Pad

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

Side programme

 * Sumana proposes: Monday we visit a NOLA haunted house
 * FYI, all weekend the Crescent City Blues and BBQ festival is happening less than 2 blocks from LaunchPad. Free music, with food and drinks available to purchase. http://www.jazzandheritage.org/blues-fest/

Attendees

 * Afeldman (Asher)
 * Ben Hartshorne
 * Ben Lobaugh
 * Brion Vibber
 * CT Woo, Director of Technical Operations, Wikimedia Foundation
 * Dana Isokawa, Executive Assistant to the VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
 * Daniel Renfro
 * Chad Horohoe
 * Eloquence (Erik Moeller)
 * DJ Bauch
 * Kevin Brown
 * Leisa Fearing
 * Leslie Carr, Operations Engineer (Networking), Wikimedia Foundation
 * Mark Hershberger
 * Mark Mims
 * Markus Glaser
 * Max Semenik
 * Mutante (Daniel Zahn)
 * Pyoungmeister (Peter)
 * Sam Reed
 * Roan Kattouw
 * Rob Halsell
 * Rob Lanphier
 * Russ Nelson
 * Ryan Lane
 * Gary Anderson
 * Salvatore Ingala
 * Sumana Harihareswara
 * Tim Starling
 * Connor Smith
 * Add your name here if you're intending to come!

Volunteers

 * Leisa Fearing : I'm local. If you can't reach Ryan Lane and have any vocabulary, restaurant, event, transportation, etc. questions I'm happy to help.

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!

Accommodation
All hotels are also in walking distance of most of the attractions of the city.

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: +1 415 839 6885 ext 6689 (this will go directly to Dana)
 * Program coordination: Sumana Harihareswara sumanah at wikimedia.org
 * Logistics: Ryan Lane
 * Assistant: Dana Isokawa