General developer forum

Thanks for this post David

We are considering including a Hackfest into the next Moodle Moot here in New Zealand - so I will be interested to see what people say here

For anyone who has not been to a hackfest before, they normally involve more yacking than hacking. That is people talking to each other. That is not unreasonable, since you can write code any time, but talking to other Moodle developers face-to-face is something you can't do often.

I also don't think there should be much, if any plenary talks or mini-presentations. Hackfests should be workshops where everyone participates, not one person at the front talking.

I think the best-organised hack-fest I went to was the one in Edinburgh last year. It used an organised unconference structure:

• At the start we spent some time writing things we wanted to talk about on post-it notes.
• These were stuck on the wall grouped by theme.
• Then we were all given a certain number (4? 6?) sticky dots which we could stick on the topics we wanted to be part of discussing.
• Then Michael de Raadt spent some time analysing that, do decide the programme for the rest of the day. There were 40 participants, so we had about 4 groups of 10 for 4 sessions, so up to 16 topics.
• And, in fact, while Michael was doing that Martin Dougiamas said some general things to everyone, so I guess that counts as a plenary talk, but we can probably make an exception for Martin.
• Actually, in this hackfest, things ended up falling into about 12 sessions, so the the last of the 4 sessions was kept for any discussions that had not finished earlier.
• The other good thing was that there was a lot of encouragement for each group to write notes during their discussion, and link them to the wiki: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Hackfest_UK_2014
• And, indeed, to follow that up later by turning the notes into a proper spec.
• Also, though I said no mini-presentations, there was one, I suggested that sam marshall into did a demo of the process of fixing a bug in Moodle core, and enough people voted for that so that he did. But that was still a group of people sitting round a table, not a classic presentation.
• The structure was not strict. People were welcome to head off on their one as a small group to discuss something if they wanted. For example, towards the end I managed to grab Bas Brands and Stuart Lamour, and we had a good chat about the Quiz UI that lead to these ideas. (I wish I had had time to implement more of those by now.)

As I say, I thought this was the most successful hackfest I had been to. What do other people who were there think?

I don't attended any Moodle hackfest, but I did some hackatons.

For that one I like the most, I grap some interesting points, and some of them you suggested above:

1. State the hackfest focus upfront. People attending will be really interesting on that or those hackfest themes.
2. Make few quick presentations of 10-15 minutes of usefull things/aspects/technology/whatever, that will be really useful for later on when discussing. For instance, the general and official workflow for the new log api v2, if that is some of the topics of the hackfest.
3. Throw ideas to deliberate on (like the case of Tim Hunt's success story).
4. Group ideas into general topics and build workshops for each general topic, either simultaneously or just few at a time, so that people interested in severa topics may have the opportunity to participate.

The point 1 is very important for the viewpoint of the organization to focus discussions on some topics. But point 3 is really important to get participants get virtually "the control" of the hackfest, since they are discussing the topics they promoted too.

Have a nice day!

Jordi

Two points that are not really answers to David's questions, but worth mentioning.

• Having a mandate from users to focus on an area of development will increase success
  Users are critical when development results in things that don't benefit them in a tangible way. It is true that developers can be tempted to refactor API code because it falls below some perceived standard, when there is often more critical work needed. A plan for the upcoming UK Moot (and possibly others) is to have working groups early in the conference followed by a developer hackfest at the end, which would generate the mandate developers could then work to. Developers would, of course, be welcomed at the earlier sessions. Not all hackfest work needs to flow from such user input, but some/most should.
  
• The goal should be solid designs
  As people have suggested, there's more talk than coding at a hackfest. That's not a bad thing, in fact it's probably the best use of that time. The goal of the hackfest should therefore be solid designs, taking suggestions from users and transforming them into a form that can be implemented. If people are keen to contributed later by implementing that design in code, then that's a bonus, but not one that should be expected of everyone who attends.
  

Hi David,

Thinking out of the box and with Moodle being global with developers all over the place, would a Hackfest work virtually?  Just like iMoot works well with Big Blue Button.  Then developers from all over who are unable to attend Moots for varying reasons could do so.

And virtual developer speak does work -> 

Gareth

If I can turn the question around a little and say what doesn't work:

• Having too-broad and audience. I remember one developer day where we completely consumed by admins/interested users with all their various problems. It prevented much progress on the planned future work agenda. (Note: thats not to say that I don't think thats valuable - in fact a 'meet the developers' day would be cool and I know there are intentions of some sorts of specification workshops which would also facilitate that).
  
• Coding during the event - as others have said - it's a bit of a pipe dream and not the most valuable part of such a thing (although I will note that Tim seems a pro at it!)