2006 OpenBSD Hackathon Well Underway 71
An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap is running a two part who's who at the 2006 OpenBSD Hackathon. Starting on the 27th and running for a full week, developers get together and concentrate on communication rather than just development. Project leader Theo de Raadt was quoted as saying 'I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.'"
Re:Yeah. (Score:3, Funny)
I gotta say, the AC has a point. I spend 50-60 hours a week writing code because, uh, that's what I'm paid to do.
Re:Yeah. (Score:4, Funny)
'I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.'"
WTF? What the hell are they doing, then? JFC, it must be fscking nice... No Karma points for them. Bad developers! Bad! *smacks nose with newspaper*
Re:Yeah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah. (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah... and some people also call that **College**
you're not alone doing this (Score:3, Insightful)
For just one project that does this often, see http://plone.org/events/sprints [plone.org]
Re:you're not alone doing this (Score:2)
No one else does an -athon? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No one else does an -athon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No one else does an -athon? (Score:2, Informative)
http://wiki.debian.org/BSPMarathon [debian.org]
Debian does two weeks! (Score:1)
Actually, Debian developers do more. (approx) 250 Debian Developers have recently (two weeks ago) attended this year's Debian Conference [debconf.org] in Mexico. Not everybody hacked all the time (as the pictures proved [debconf.org]) but there was quite a bit of it.
Also, even if the main conference is held yearly, there are mini conferences held with fewer people (30-100) in, at least, Australia, Japan and Spain [debian.org.es].
Pfft! A week?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Axes? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Axes? (Score:2)
Nah.. Just pitchforks....
Re:heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:heh (Score:1)
Works for me... let them learn somehere else, then come and do their best work on OpenBSD.
Re:heh (Score:2)
Re:heh (Score:1)
It's a regular expression, not a variable name.
English is a script, not a compilable language.
Re:heh (Score:1)
Actually its a glob [catb.org] or wildcard expression. To be a regular expression it would have to contain the dot character before the asterisk.
Re:heh (Score:1)
Oh, nevermind.
Re:I like OpenBSD and all, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I like OpenBSD and all, but... (Score:2, Informative)
WTF? Contradiction in the Summary! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WTF? Contradiction in the Summary! (Score:1, Troll)
Re:WTF? Contradiction in the Summary! (Score:1)
Like ninjas?
Re:WTF? Contradiction in the Summary! (Score:3)
How is this useful? (Score:4, Insightful)
When FreeBSD developer summits occur (e.g., at the recent BSDCan), there is always some important hacking done, but the most useful result of the devsummit is that people can talk to each other and make decisions about where the project should going next (e.g., dropping support for Alpha, working more on embedded/arm support, et cetera). Clearly we're missing something important -- can someone more familiar with OpenBSD tell me what the ingredient is in Theo's Magic Kool-Aid which makes developers better at hacking code when they all get together in a single room?
Re:How is this useful? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How is this useful? (Score:2)
Re:How is this useful? (Score:5, Informative)
As an analogy imagine if you were part of a team creating a car. Each person in the team is worked on just part of the car.
Person 1 says, "I like engines so I am going to work on engine development."
Person 2 says, "I like tires so I am going to work on tires and wheels."
Person 3 says, "I like safety features so I am going to work on safety."
etc.
Now imagine all of these people working on their respective components but in different countries around the world, completely independent of the rest, it could be difficult to ensure proper integration and compatability. Yes they chat, e-mail, etc but when many people are side by side it is much easier to discuss problems you are facing, either design issues, implementaion issues or whatever. Plus, you get to be around a lot of dialogue and discussions that could help enlighten you to other methods or ways of doing things better.
This could just be an oversimplification, but if you work directly with a lot of cool and fun people you admire and are admired by, let's face it, it probably is a lot more fun and productive. It is a team effort of people that like what they are doing and want to do it all lead by captain TdR. Plus I imagine there is some Humppa playing there as well?
Note: I am no developer nor have I ever been to an OpenBSD hackathon.
Re:How is this useful? (Score:1)
Re:How is this useful? (Score:1)
* lon3st4r*
What about DebConf? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not knocking OpenBSD's hackathon, just pointing out that it's hardly unique. Many other FOSS projects have similar gatherings.
Re:What about DebConf? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about DebConf? (Score:1)
Re:What about DebConf? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes he is insightful. You can download the evidence. Download almost any OSS software, be it application or OS in the form of the Linux kernel or Linux distribution. Use them, read the man pages and other documentation, etc. Download the source and read some of it.
Now download OpenBSD, use it, read the documentation, read some of the source.
OpenBSD and related project source is clean and professional and the resulting binaries
Meet the Hackathon (Score:5, Informative)
This year, Bob Beck and Reyk Floeter will give a talk to the group and many Hackathon participants on their directions in wireless chipset support, advanced feature support, and security support.
At SAIT, June 1, 6PM - all details at
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/ [cuug.ab.ca]
Re:Meet the Hackathon (Score:2)
And beyond the fact that you'll be able to listen to some top developers in the industry, this is your opportunity to get your hands on OpenBSD 3.9 CDs, T-shirts and posters !
Re:Meet the Hackathon (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm looking forward to it, they had some pretty sweet demos last time. For example, to demonstrate the firewall failover capabilities, they played music on a network mount that was behind a firewall. When they shut down the primary firewall node, the music didn't even skip as the backup took over.
EA-thon (Score:1, Redundant)
Tell that to the folks at EA [slashdot.org]. Or to any other member of a startup for that matter who suspend their lives for at least a couple years.
Suspending "Lives" of some of these developers... (Score:2)
Can Acar
Can lives in Ankara, Turkey. He began using OpenBSD in 1998
Thordur Bjornson
Thordur lives in Hafnarfjordur, Iceland.
Henning Brauer
He noted that he did most of the work blindly on the airplane, and still could use hardware for testing.
Michael Coulter
Michael liv
Re:Suspending "Lives" of some of these developers. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Suspending "Lives" of some of these developers. (Score:2)
Alexandre Anriot is from Marseille, France.
Marc Balmer lives in Basel, Switzerland.
Todd Fries is from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in the US.
David Gwynne lives in Brisbane, Australia...
Matthieu Herrb lives in Toulouse, France...
Hans Hoexer lives near Nuremberg in Germany.
Mark Kettenis lives in Assen in the Netherlands.
Ray Lai lives in New York City in the US.
Chad Loder lives in California in the US.
Jolan Luff lives in Chicago, Illinois in the US.
Contradictions in the story? (Score:3, Funny)
First, we have the story submitter saying this: "developers get together and concentrate on communication rather than just development."
And then we have Theo saying this: "developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development."
Hmm...
Plone just held a week-long sprint (Score:1)
Re:OpenBSD code auditing (Score:2)
Buffer Overflows are not the only kinds of programming errors that make something insecure. Besides, between ProPolice and all the memory protection OpenBSD ships with I seriously doubt that Buffer Overflows affect it anyway.... but, again, they are bugs, and bugs should be squashed, even if they cause no harm.