Quite a while ago, I suggested to ABE.pm that we should get together and do some group hacking. When someone said, "HACKATHON??" I said, "Good grief, no!" I just wanted to do some messing about and have fun, without worrying about goals or accomplishments. Also, "hackathon" sounds like the hacking equivalent of running 26.2 miles: gruelling. I wanted to make sure it was clear that the point was to hang out, and that hacking was just the entertainment.
At any rate, since I knew we had our technical venue booked for this past week and I knew that I didn't have any good talks prepared and I knew I wasn't going to get a guest speaker with no notice, I declared that it was time for hacking. For a project, I decided we'd play with a game I was working on earlier in the year. It still has oodles of things that need to be done, ranging from the trivial to the really complex. It uses lots of fun new stuff, and it's just sort of a fun project in general.
I installed Debian (sid) on a virtual machine on my Mac, installed all the prerequisites, git, and some other essentials, and briefly refamiliarized myself with the code we'd be working on. Unfortunately, not all of this happened before the event began -- but that's fine. We still had a good time. A few bugs got fixed, some new ones got revealed, and I think everyone had a pretty good time.
Next time, we should be able to get started much faster. I've made a lot of improvements to the virt's setup based on our experiences that night, and I've learned a few good things about git and some other involved tools.
I'm itching to have another hacking session, but I'll have to wait for July. Our next meeting, in June, is a social meeting. While I'm very tempted to declare that we'll be doing a tech meeting again, that would mean that we would not go to McGrady's for hot wings and a Fahy burger. I don't think I can get behind that kind of trade-off.
