Operation S.A.D — Day 0
Hackathons are unique events. No presentations & no slides. You hit the hackathon room with one idea in mind: Write code for the fun of it. Footballers spend their days playing around with a ball. A marathon runner spends at least 1 hour running per day, for fun. What do IT folks do to keep their mind sharp & agile ? Some of them write code for Linux and other open source projects. Linux allows anyone with an idea to come make it a reality. You don’t need to sign a draconian agreement with a large corporate to do it, and have your code locked in a safe. Although a large majority of Linux is written by paid programmers , there still exists groups of hobbyists who do it for fun.
In Mauritius, Hackers.mu is such a group. They love Linux, and Open Source software. So great is their love that they took 2 days of local leaves on the 28th and 29th of April to hack on it. They take Linux, peel off the layers of code, and start poking at the internals. Hacking — to them — means writing code for the pleasure of it. Why would someone take 2 days off work to sit in front of a computer ? They simply love the challenge. It is what makes them tick. They see something, and tell themselves: “We can make it better by changing this, and putting this …”.
The hackathon started early: At 9:30, most of the Hackers were busy setting up their laptops. Power cables were laid all around the conference room of ISVTEC, who graciously decided to host the event. All of them were already familiar with which corner of Linux they want to poke around.
I will not spoil what happened today. Avinash Meetoo (a member of Hackers.mu) will do a keynote speech on Saturday at 13:00 in the Flying dodo conference room.
Some of the funny moments happened when Yash, realized that running Google chrome caused his laptop to lock up, repeatedly. He was stuck with no graphical web browser, and resorted to use only the command line to do the rest of his hacking.
For lunch, we went to a very nice place next to Green Cross building. The pizza was absolutely delicious. Anoop loved the pizza, despite not being a fan of pizzas, in general.
After lunch, we went back to do some furious hacking. I was busy discussing ways to solve some of the problems encountered, and reviewing some of the code done by others. Selven was also present virtually, and his hacking quickly turned into solid solutions. Codarren was probably the fastest hacker around by submitting his code first. Nitin proved his skills by assisting others with some of his advanced tricks that can save people hours, on top of getting his fair share of work done.
Overall, it was a fun day, and it ended with some interesting ideas. I personally learned a lot by having fruitful exchanges with the rest of Hackers.mu.
