Good advice, Tim.
I won't be at Wikimania or at the hackathon; I hope people have a lot of useful conversations.
If you want something to happen, it's a good idea to put it on https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon/Brainstorming now. For instance, if you want there to be an architecture discussion around Daniel Kinzler's idea of using factory functions for component instantiation or you want to learn how to review code better, or you want a repeat of one of the tutorials from Zurich that you missed https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich_Hackathon_2014/Schedule , ask for it now so people can plan a bit. :)
Sumana Harihareswara Senior Technical Writer Wikimedia Foundation
On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 10:09 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 21/07/14 00:24, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
On 07/19/2014 05:47 AM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) wrote:
I've never been to a hackathon before! What should I expect? Are any of you guys coming?
Hackathons tend to cover the range from "complete newbie" to "Brion"; it's the meeting place for everyone who are involved - or want to get involved - in everything related to technical aspects of Mediawiki/Wikimedia; from core to language to tools.
It will be big, maybe 345 people. If previous Wikimanias are a useful guide, many of the people will be locals who have only a passing interest in MediaWiki, and were just looking for a cheap tech conference to go to. Local students who know nothing about MediaWiki will walk up to you and shake your hand, while some active, long-term developers will sit in a corner by themselves staring at their laptops.
Reading name badges is useful, especially if the font is large enough that it can be read without seeming intrusive. Hopefully we will have a wikified attendence list. If you know that someone is present who you want to talk to, you can ask someone to point them out to you.
My advice is to concentrate on the things you can't do at home. Meet people, get to know them, build a rapport. Listen to their ideas, get inspired, share your own ideas in return. Don't expect to write a significant amount of code.
I will be there.
-- Tim Starling
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