OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend
Last weekend we held another Hack Weekend for OpenStreetMap, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. Especially the start, which involved sitting outside on a warm spring evening with a cold beer and unwinding!
This was probably one of the largest Hack Weekends that we've ran so far - I counted 25 people at one point - and I volunteered to help anyone who was interested in using git, developing Potlatch2 and improving the Rails Port (aka the OpenStreetMap website). As part of this I ran a few short workshops which were surprisingly well attended - I'd expected 2 or 3 people for each one but ended up with 10-15 each instead! I'll be interested to see what workshops people are interested in for the next Hack Weekend.
When I wasn't running workshops or helping other people, I was working with Richard Fairhurst on the Potlatch 2.0 release - and this was the point where we made it the default editor on the OpenStreetMap website. It's been painful for the last few months watching thousands of people learning to use potlatch1, so we've just made a big step in making OpenStreetMap easier to get started with. The news made it onto OpenGeoData and even ReadWriteWeb. Development doesn't stop at 2.0, of course - we've got lots of in-progress work on branches (including the long-awaited History dialog that I've been working on) and it'll be good to see them being merged in when they are ready. We also managed to spot a few bugs within the first few hours of the new release!
It was also great to see a bunch of people committing code to projects they'd never worked on before - one of the main reasons we run the weekends. There was lots of work on the Rails Port, including improving the layout on mobile screens and working round bugs with postgres 9. But I've no idea what everyone was up to at the far end of the room - it was such a big, busy weekend that I couldn't keep track! One thing that was prevalent were people picking up git for the first time, and our recent migration to using git for Potlatch2 proved really useful when juggling which features to include in 2.0 and which to leave for further development.
I'm looking forward to the next Hack weekend, which Matt is already organising. If you're tempted to come help develop OSM and learn something new, you should come along!
This post was posted on 6 April 2011 and tagged OpenStreetMap