dean

I had a great time hacking on the Perl Navigator and Raku Navigator as part of the Perl IDE Hackathon 2022. Thank you to everyone who volunteered their time in person or remotely. Thanks especially to Brian for having many github issues ready for people to work on, and for helping so many people understand the concepts of Language Servers. I received compliments that the Hackathon was very organized but truthfully if people got that impression then Brian should get all the credit!

As a community I feel we could do better at helping people getting started and involved, so my goal was to emphasize first time and one off contributions. Brian caught the vision on this and as mentioned, did a great job preparing github issues and spent much of his time getting peoples development environment running. Hopefully he will post a report on what got done in the near future.

The training room worked well as a venue and the hotel wifi "just worked" for all our needs. We where nicely stocked with snacks & drinks plus a few power strips (power boards) courtesy of the conference. A projector and some white boards where offered for which I am grateful.

But I am optimistic that our success with Perl Navigator and Raku Navigator can inspire other Perl projects. We as a community would benefit from a mindset shift such that when spotted, "low hanging fruit" is suitably documented in github issues (etc) and left for new comers. I think it's a very mature developer that leaves work for junior developers (and supports them working through it) whilst themselves focusing on bigger tasks.

What I would do differently next time is to ensure there is a quick way for people to get their development environment running and to understand it at a high level. I would also encourage the projects to think of ways to take advantage of people's varied platform of choice (windows, mac, linux, bsd, etc). I also think remote participants can be involved better, but I am still pondering how that might happen.

I look forward to organizing a Hackathon again!

Reminder: The Pull Request Club is a great way for people and projects to connect for one off contributions.