A week ago I was at Nottingham University with other from the Met Office hackathon team setting up tables, chairs, and the rest, ready for the two day Geohack geospatial hackathon. Of course the preparation for the event started months earlier as part of the even bigger effort of preparing for the FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G is an international gathering of open source geospatial developers, and although I wasn't able to stay for the whole conference several of my colleagues did and it seems like it was a really well organised and interesting event. There were certainly some great folks there judging from those who turned up a couple of days early to join the hackathon.
The hackathon was open to delegates and others who registered on the
Geohack website. It was free to attended and you even got the traditional hackathon pizza and beer.
It was an international gathering, so I got to meet and hack with folks I wouldn't normally get to meet back home in Devon. Here I am with
Willow Brugh and
Steve Citron-Pousty doing that thing where everyone stares at their gadgets rather than have a conversation.
Seriously though, we had a good chat and hopefully we'll find more chances to work together if only for a couple of days. Once Steve got over his jet-lag, or more likely just learnt to live with it he got stuck in and managed to "sell" OpenShift as the solution most of the teams needed. He even found time to write
a great blog post.
All the teams produced excellent work, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see at least one or two turned into real services over the next few months.
So why didn't I stay for the whole of the excellent FOSS4G conference? Well I had another hackathon to go to - of course. More on that in the next blog post.
