What is Hackergarten ?

Hackergarten is a craftmen’s workshop, classroom, a laboratory, a social circle, a writing group, a playground, and an artist’s studio. Our goal is to create something that others can use; whether it be working software, improved documentation, or better educational materials. Our intent is to end each meeting with a patch or similar contribution submitted to an open and public project. Membership is open to anyone willing to contribution their time.

In short, changing the open source world, one commit at a time!

And that’s what we did at Devoxx 2013 yesterday. Several of us got together in the back of a room, did a poll on what technologies everybody is interested in, gathered around the tables, and started hacking right away!

I was coordinating a team that helped create Arquillian tests for Java EE 7 samples. It was pretty amazing that most of the folks stayed from 9:30am – 5pm, without any break. We had lots of interesting discussions, tons of information exchange on how Java EE 7 work, how Arquillian enables to write container-independent tests and run them in a managed or remote environment easily, how to file bugs on JCP specs, and much more.

Here are some pictures from the event:

Here is the state of samples repo the morning of hackergarten:

And here is the state the morning after hackergarten:

As you can see the repo got:

• 5 new contributors
• 63 new commits
• 10 more forks

And to give a slightly better idea of what we did in the hackergarten, here is a pulse of samples repo in the last 24 hrs:

This to me, summarizes the power of hackergarten.

Many thanks to @aslakknutsen, @radcortez, @pdudits, @alexishassler, @g_scheibel, @xcoulon, @lightguardjp and many others who helped in making this successful. Even @jfarcand participated remotely in this hackergarten and contributed a new sample.

Of course, this was not possible without Andres Almiray‘s initiative!

A Jenkins job is running on cloudbees and will hopefully generate a consolidated test report on WildFly soon.

The whole experience completely blew away my expectations and I’m truly learning the power of Red Hat’s spirit of “Community Powered Collaboration”.

The formal conference starts in a few hours, and I better get my run in before that. Come talk to me and lets talk you can help with this effort.

See you there!