So I am sat letting my brain decompress at high speed after the first ever DBIx::Class Hackathon in existence. Dbic is a project written in Perl which in very loose terms is a relational mapper for databases.(1)
On Saturday, 12th April 2014, we gathered at the unlikely location of a Community Centre in the town of Swindon. The participants hailed from Germany, Spain, Scotland and England and even far flung 'round the corner'. Jess 'castaway' Robinson was the organiser and her residency in Swindon the reason for the location, and she did a fine job of organising the first ever event.
We had assumed that only a handful of people would have the time to attend, especially for a fledgling event on a single day. To attract international attendees is a massive score, and fifteen hackers make a good gaggle to do work with.
My task today, with my co-conspirator Ian norton also of Shadowcat infamy, was to implement a new design for DBIx::Class on the web, a simple enough plan as the site was already built. Or so I thought. Ribasushi had other plans, he wanted a number of issues addressed and had a task list for me to follow. A number of issues had already been covered, quite excellently, by the site's principal designer. Ian Norton and I decided we would tackle some of the others to a good enough level to get the new site launched.
I don't want to go into the full extent of the 13 tasks we covered from Ribasushi, nor do I want to raise the frustrations at Javascipt libraries we were unfamiliar with and image redesigns that Ian and I deemed necessary to the site. I do want to apologise to my fellow attendees for the occasional language and outbursts and for taking their images and stealing their souls.
Part of what I wanted to achieve was a fresh look to the initiative and to spur along community involvement. I think we achieved that and I would like to mention once again that DPetrov and the amazing people like Micheala, Amalia and Miheala at Evozon have been so supportive. I also should mention that it was the ubiquitous SawyerX who first pestered me about this some time ago, it took us some time, but here it is.
We did however miss that the site had been made into a templated system (oops) by the ever reliable Dpetrov. We also introduced a couple of new features (yeah i mean bugs) that will be worked on.
What we mostly achieved is a fresh start, a good deal of faffing with new technologies and ideas, a nice hack with food and drink (soft drinks for most of the day and one or two people who were not driving had a can of ale later). We also spurred on a lot of feedback from the community, a raft of bug reports/enhancements and suggestions and a think a kick in the right direction for the site.
It is a testament to castaway and riba that we achieved so much. Guys it was a great day, well worth the effort, next year maybe two days so that we can have slightly shorter days and a slightly longer evening rest without total fall over :)
Notes
(1) However if you ask Ribasushi, Castaway or mst they will tell you that it really isn't and almost, well maybe if you want to call it that which it isn't really.
