BooK

After the successful Quack and Hack 2012 Europe in December 2012 in Paris, Getty and the French Perl Mongers are doing it again!

This new Perl hackathon is named patch -p0 (yes, there'll be more), and will be held (as usual) in the Carrefour Numérique de la Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (niveau -1), in Paris, from Friday, July 27 2013, to Sunday July 29, 2013.

Organization details

Just come with your projects, your ideas, your to-do lists, your itches, and a laptop to scratch them. We provide connectivity, drinks, food, power for three days. And people to share, learn, progress with. The only limitation is that you work on something Perl-related, be it code, documentation, tests, websites...

There is a limited number of seats (about 30), so to avoid reserving them for people who might not come, there is a "reservation fee" of 30€. If you ask for it, it will be refunded (in cash) on site during the hackathon. Otherwise, thanks for your participation in the cost.

If you need accomodation, we have booked 7 twin rooms (2 beds) in a hotel nearby, for 70€ per person and per night. You can book your room and bed on the hackathon website.

The site is run with Act, so if you've ever been to a Perl event, you already know how it works.

MOAR French Hackathons

In 2012, I organized the Perl QA Hackathon in Paris, with the invaluable help of Laurent Boivin (elbeho). The hackathon was hosted for free at La Cités des Sciences et de l'Industrie, which has been the host of many a French Perl event.

Getty (Torsten Raudssus) attended that hackathon and enjoyed the setting very much. So much that he asked for Laurent's help to organized the Quack and Hack 2012 Europe. This was so great, that Torsten wanted to have more hackathons, still in the same location. It took them basically one day to set it up, and one month to find a name ("French Perl Summer Hackathon"). At this point, Getty is basically using France as his headquarters for world domination by Perl.

While chatting with the organizers about the hackathon, I realized that the French were leading the Perl-hackathon-organizing race with 4 hackathons so far (two in the past: Perl QA Hackathon 2012, Quack and Hack 2012 Europe; and two in the future: French Perl Summer Hackathon 2013 and Perl QA Hackathon 2014). Since Getty basically wanted to have as many hackathons in la Cité as possible, we're likely to have more!

What's in a name?

I really wanted to have a good name for those French Perl hackathons, so we started to brainstorm on IRC. Believe it or not, it's not easy to come up with a good acronym using the letters P, F and H...

Nothing beats IRC logs, so here goes, skipping the other ideas and acronyms that came up, along with some of Getty's swearing (from #mongueurs on 2013-06-08):

00:27 < BooK> Getty: I'm gonna brainstorm you
00:29 < BooK> Perl in France (gadget) #$ lame joke for older French people
00:29 < BooK> elbeho: do you have a website yet?
00:30 < elbeho> BooK: Maddingue ahs the answer
00:30 < Maddingue> nt yet
00:30 < elbeho> BooK: not yet
00:30 < elbeho> :-p
00:31 < Getty> yeah?
00:31 < Getty> what?
00:31 < Getty> what?
00:31 < BooK> looking a name for your hackathon
00:31 < elbeho> (again)
00:31 < Getty> yeah bla not that topic again
00:31 < Getty> you have 2-3 hours to convince me
00:31 < Getty> go!
00:31 < Getty> just drop names
00:31 < elbeho> tnnh : the no name hackathon
00:31 < Getty> and i say yes and no
00:32 < Getty> LLLLOOOOOLLLLLL
00:32 < Getty> buit you must say sorry to Maddingue then
00:32 < Maddingue> make a hackathon to name the hackathon
00:32 < Getty> he already made fpsh2013
00:32 < Maddingue> not yet
00:32 < Getty> AH luckily ;)
00:32 < Getty> ok Book: what you got?
00:32 < elbeho> thwncate : the hackathon whose name came after the event
00:34 < BooK> Getty: not much for now
00:34 < BooK> I'd like to emphasize the .fr aspect of it, and maybe convince my friends here to start a series
00:35 < Getty> you know
00:35 < Getty> good names dont grow on trees
00:35 < Getty> and i think we should not making it big
00:35 < Getty> but seasons are a good deal
00:35 < BooK> we should make it regular
00:35 < Getty> yeah
00:35 < Getty> French Perl Winter hackathon
00:35 < Getty> Summer Hackathon
00:35 < Getty> spring hackathon
00:35 < elbeho> let me get a string
00:36 * elbeho now hangs
00:36 < Getty> elbeho: HAHAHHAA you love the idea
00:36 < Getty> its a franchaise product
00:37 < Getty> other execute elbehos plan
00:37 < Getty> and you are the central gatherer of the experiences
00:37 < BooK> let's name it after pig parts thens
00:37 < Getty> so that you tune the concepts even more and more
00:37 < Getty> LOL!
00:37 < BooK> Perl in Group

After some more head-scratching and grepping through /usr/share/dict/words...

00:55 < elbeho> Idea: let's organize a hackathon whose goal is to find a name for the hackathon
00:55 < BooK> Perl in Teams, Code and Hack = PITCH
00:55 < BooK> elbeho: brilliant!
00:56 < franck> Perl and Talks, Code, Hack = PATCH

Now that we had a name, we knew we wanted more than one. (Getty wants them to be seasonal!) As every Perl hacker knows, if something's harder than naming your project, it's coming up with a numbering/versioning scheme.

01:03 < Getty> we number it
01:03 < BooK> with the year
01:03 < Getty> no.....
01:03 < BooK> WITH THE WEEK!
01:03 < Getty> no.................
01:03 < Getty> we just number them up
01:03 < Getty> patch1
01:03 < Getty> patch2
01:03 < Getty> patch3
01:03 < Getty> patch4
01:03 < Getty> patch5
01:03 < franck> meh
01:03 < franck> patch -p1
01:03 < franck> patch -p2
01:03 < BooK> franck++
01:04 < BooK> but that gets us further and further away from the files, right?
01:04 < BooK> or closer?
01:04 < Maddingue> I'm surprised BooK hasn't already suggested to use sha1 ID like git
01:04 < franck> haha
01:04 < BooK> sha1 are irrelevant, I keep changing them
01:04 < Getty> lol

The patch utility has an option that takes numbers, so it's a nice touch to use it in the name of our hackathon.

Patch is a nice name for a hackathon, but what really made it stick is the fact that it is one of the first programs published by Larry Wall (in 1985):

01:05 < BooK> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(Unix)#History # THE reason why PATCH is THE name
01:05 < Getty> thats awesome
01:05 < Getty> ok Patch it is
01:05 < BooK> it is
01:05 < Getty> and lets number it

We'll find a nice backronym in time.

I hope this little insight the heads of the crazy people who want to get together to hack with Perl makes you want to join us in Paris in a few weeks.

See you there!