Operation S.A.D Day 1
The second day of Operation S.A.D turned out to be less chaotic. I noticed how many hackers had learned from their mistakes from the previous day. This in turn allowed me more time to tick off a few items on my personal list.
I was surprised to see that I was not the first one to enter the hackathon room. Nitin was already present, and he was about to publish his next series of patches. Akhil and Yash were also present, and I noticed how their confidence had increased.
I sat at my place, and reviewed a few patches that others had bounced around. Once Anoop got there, I also noticed that he quickly got up to speed, and was very silent. The silence from the room was a bit worrying to me. The occasional talk was about asking for technical advice. The session was very intense. Most of the hackers.mu members had submitted their code by 11:40. I had some trouble with convincing some of them to leave their computers to eat at 12:10. Hacking Linux can become very addictive !
We went to a small restaurant close by for some chinese food. The discussions was pretty interesting, regarding how Hackathons should be organized, and what we could improve for the next one.
Once we got back to the hackroom, we started getting feedback from open source projects about our code. Some of our submissions had to be re-sent due to the wrong formatting. Thanks to Cyril, we were able to fix that ! I was surprised at the instant feedback that we got. There was a pattern: as soon as we submitted one patch, open source projects responded almost immediately, and assigned it to their developer teams for review.
We finished earlier than expected. I declared the hackathon closed by 17:00. The second day was very intense: little talk, and strong focus on crafting the code, and shaking the bugs. We started packing and cleaning at 17:30.
We thanked Cyril and the staff of ISVTEC for their support of Operation S.A.D, and bid the hackroom goodbye. One year ago, I remember talking to Selven about organizing a Linux hackathon in Mauritius. One year later, it became a reality ! One of the geeky jokes was whether one can use a nickname to submit code to open source projects. My reply to Yash was how will he be able to prove that he is “The Batman from Mauritius” ?
(We’ll be in Flying DoDo conference at 13:00 with the keynote speech from Avinash Meetoo on Saturday, and some surprises :) )
