Celebrating Hacksgiving!

Published on 2015-11-16 by R. Tyler Croy

Next week in the US we have a national holiday where, generally speaking, lots of turkey gets converted into left-over turkey sandwiches. For many software developers the Thanksgiving holiday also represents a lull in project schedules, freeing up some time to hack on pet projects or even contribute to open source projects.

Taking a cue from the Adopt a Plugin program that Daniel wrote about earlier this month, we thought it would be fun to organize a "virtual hackathon" to coincide with that gap in project schedules. Thus Hacksgiving 2015 was created!

We'll be hosting Hacksgiving Nov 23rd and Nov 24 from 7:00PST - 15:00PST (10:00EST - 18:00EST) and would love for you to join! (RSVP here)

You don't need to know Java to help! We will have documentation and design hacking going on as well.

We have a few goals for Hacksgiving:

  1. Introduce new contributors to the process of writing code and/or documentation (documentation hacking details here).
  2. Find some plugins which are up for adoption new maintainers.
  3. Clean up or merge some existing plugins which need some care (listed here). ### Sessions to note

Here are some of the sessions scheduled that will be hosted by members of community that may interest you:

Day One

  • 7:00PST/10:00EST (15-30min) - rtyler will host a welcome and introduction to contribution to the Jenkins project (walking through our contributors guide)
  • 10:00PST/13:00EST (60min) - schristou will host a workshop titled "Introduction to plugin development for Jenkins"

Day Two

  • 10:00PST/13:00EST (60min) - abayer will be hosting a "Plugin Developer Open Q&A" session, so bring your questions!

Hacksgiving is very unconference structured right now, so if you're interested in hosting a session please let us know in the #jenkins-community channel or by signing up for a session on the schedule

How to participate

Since this is a virtual hackathon, we'll be congregating and chatting in a couple of ways:

  • On the #jenkins IRC channel as per usual
  • We'll be hosting sessions and tutorials via Google Hangouts, see the "hacker hangout* section on the wiki page up to date details
  • Via the #hacksgiving hashtag on Twitter

You can also RSVP on our meetup page!

We hope you can join in the festivities!

About the Author
R. Tyler Croy

R. Tyler Croy has been part of the Jenkins project for the past seven years. While avoiding contributing any Java code, Tyler is involved in many of the other aspects of the project which keep it running, such as this website, infrastructure, governance, etc.