organizing a hackathon howto and thoughts

@teleivo

In previous hackatons, there was some problems with access and everything.

New users can be blocked by our spam filter, and also they don’t have access to write in confluence or they don’t have access to JIRA.

Is there any chance you could convince people to register beforehand? Anyway, PM me later with more details (do they need JIRA access? wiki?)

I have looked at the ticket and it looks perfect. So yes, go ahead. :slight_smile: Since your date is still far, you are going to have to create a good number of them because am sure some of the GSOC aspirants are going to steal some of them. They are juicy! :smile:

Thank you for mentioning this. I wrote that people need to create an OpenMRS ID under a “mandatory pre-hackathon TODOs” section in the wiki. I am creating a meetup event (with link to the wiki) where people will pre-register, where I will also send out a message to the participants maybe two weeks in advance to remind them to create the OpenMRS ID.

When they have created an OpenMRS ID, do they need to create a helpdesk case to get JIRA access? If so can you please point me to the wiki so I can link that into the hackathon wiki instructions. They need JIRA access so they can claim issues.

haha, yes you are probably right :wink: but I wont be sad, since if they complete the tickets they help us anyway :smile: I think its good to have this much advance since its my first one and this way I also dont put to much stress on the ticket reviewers since they have more time.

Yes, they need to go to https://help.openmrs.org/ and request JIRA access (please mention their ID).

I’m OK as well if you send it in batch (as in, one request with several different accounts to be granted access).

They should raise a ticket on the same place if their IP is blacklisted by spam filters too.

This is very good and important information @cintiadr :slight_smile: @teleivo do you think you can add it to our wiki page of how to organize hackathons?

ID Dashboard 2.1 will have it in 2 locations if they haven’t requested access. There’s a dialog that people must dismiss now.

If you know their OpenMRS IDs now…you could probably get a head start

I did update https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/How+To+Organize+An+OpenMRS+Hackathon with a Preparation section containing this information.

Can someone update https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/ISM/OpenMRS+ID since I dont have permission to edit the page. I think a section with ‘How Can I Get It?’ with link to https://id.openmrs.org/ + info on JIRA access through helpdesk would be good.

the ticket is already in progress :joy: you are so wise!!!

Loollll. It was too attractive not to be stolen by someone watching. :smile:

I will update it tonight. PS…it’s being taken down tonight for an hour.

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There are some tickets from the OMRS16-Hackathon here https://issues.openmrs.org/issues/?filter=17156 (some are still open)

@teleivo by the way congratulations on joining ThoughtWorks.

While you were away SDK became the most awesome tool equivalent of the GNU utilities for Linux, I suggest that you help the hackathon attendees set this up as it will speed up your environment setup for the modules especially openmrs-sdk:watch which allows changes to GSPs and Controllers to be autoloaded…

@raff and @SolDevelo team continue to work their magic …

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Hey @teleivo,

Don’t know if that’s useful to you, but this is my post about a Ebola Hackathon we organised at ThoughtWorks Brasil. It might be useful to you.

Dear all!

I’ve come up with quite a list of issues (regarding refactoring and adding tests) which I think should be enough for the first time. Unless the GSoC applicants finish them before the hackathon :joy: which would be a nice side effect!!!

Am hoping that the people that come enjoy the hackathon and get a long and that we can repeat the event to get some more long term contributions. If you still have ideas for technical tasks that you would like to get done and that have been bugging you for a while, just tell me :relaxed:

Something that bothers me is the high number of warnings Eclipse shows (+1000). Some of them are slightly hard to fix and test (I’m thinking about the generics ones) but others are easy (variables not used, deprecated methods etc.). I know it’s not a very interesting task to perform though.

good point! I did go through the most critical sonar issues, and after the critical ones are gone I would tackle the major ones. Unused vars for example where in there so Im sure some issues will be addressed. But I’ll keep that in mind. thanks @lluismf!!

Great work @teleivo :slight_smile: I see the complexity of some tickets set to High. Was that intentional?

yes, since writing tests for methods that are not tested means you have to understand code that somebody else wrote. so I just wanted to signal to participants that if they are looking for a ticket to start, maybe a simple ‘remove unused …’ is best to do first. but we can also set it to medium. not sure if there is a wiki on this :slight_smile:

At least Medium looks like a better compromise. :blush: