The Socialtext developers are a distributed team, and in May, most of us got together in Vancouver for a week-long meeting and hackathon. It was great to have face to face time with my co-workers! While some of the hackathon became a meeting-a-thon, that was productive too. Developers worked on more projects than I could keep track of, including pluggability, removing thousands of lines of code, adding a wiki view for Most Wanted Pages, making the open source release easier to install, and building test bots. We worked all week from the Sxip offices; sadly I did not get to meet Dick Hardt, but I did get an awesome tshirt that said “Who’s the dick writing comments on my blog?”
On Wednesday night we gathered at the Sophos offices for a van.pm Perlmongers meeting. I got to meet Chris Simmons and konobi, who I see all the time on irc as I lurk on #socialtext. Everyone went around the room with brief introductions; many people were from Sophos, Active State, and a few from nearby universities and small startups. Luke Closs gave a brief talk on Hacktastic Wiki Tricks, a condensed version of some things he’ll delve into at the upcoming YAPC in Houston. Kirsten Jones talked about Hydra and the Perl Foundation site, which now runs on a Socialtext wiki, with Hydra generating the front end, which looks like a static web page. Ingy schooled us all in the long, gossipy history of YAML and syck, and some forward-looking to Perl 6. Then after a break for pizza, Bill Odom did a sort of town meeting with questions and answers about The Perl Foundation, especially encouraging people to apply for grants to do Perl projects — you don’t have to be an expert or well known in the field to get funding from TPF.
On Friday, we met in the Bryght offices for a community hackathon, which we tried to model after the fabulous SuperHappyDevHouse. Though, as I pointed out, it was not in a house, otherwise it was true to the spirit of SHDH. I hung out with Roland Tanglao, Drupal hackers Steven Wittens and Ariane, Boris Mann, Miss604 who I realized afterwards was a fellow Metroblogger, and several people from Uberbabe and Free Geek, who gave (sold) me some great stickers.
In between all this gossip and talking I managed to poke around in Luke’s “Most Wanted Pages” code a little bit, earning the embarrassing nickname of “Sir Commits-a-Lot” as I floundered around with svk for the first time; and I watched Chris McMahon do some programming in Ruby, which I haven’t tried yet. My friend Heidi, who does the security bulletins for Microsoft, came up in the evening with an enormous tupperware container full of cookies and gingerbread to top off everyone’s beer and pizza and bbq experience. A further note. The geek and web 2.0 population of Vancouver intersects with startling density with the international Naked Bike Ride movement. What is it with naked bike riding and open source geeks?
In my whirlwind tour of the Web 2.0 company offices of Vancouver, I noticed they shared a particular groovy aesthetic that was beautiful, but cold and maybe too slick and lacking in couches for my taste. A little more scruffiness is really okay. The lack of cubicles rocked, as did the wacky color schemes – look at the bright green walls here:
For more photos, see Zac Bir’s Vancouver photoset or Chris Dent’s set — both of them are great photographers; I wish I had their eye for composition.
Subscribe to our blog
Subscribe to our newsletter
Watch us on YouTube