Alternate title: What I saw at the EclipseCon Europe Hackathon made my jaw drop!
I’m pretty excited about the hackathon we’re running at EclipseCon Europe.
In past hackathons, we’ve let attendees pick the bug that they want to work on. We’re going to encourage this sort of thing this time around, but want also to provide some help for those potential contributors who want to help, but don’t already have an idea.
We need some candidate bug reports.
It occurred to me that we have many open bugs reports annotated with helpwanted, indicating that committers feel that the issue addressed by the report is valid, but that they have no plans to resolve it. Some of these reports, however, are relatively large problems that could day hours, days, and weeks to resolve.
We also have many bug reports annotated with bugday. This keyword was originally used to flag reports that were candidates for a Bug Day event, but has grown to represent issues that committers feel can be addressed by a new contributor with modest effort (e.g. one or two hours).
The bugday bugs seem like a reasonable subset of candidates for the hackathon. As of this moment, there are 54 open bug reports annotated with bugday. That number drops to 40 if you include helpwanted in the search (i.e. there are 40 helpwanted bugday bugs). Both of these numbers are a little large, but are a pretty good starting point. I’m thinking that a list of 20 would be ideal.
I’m hopeful that committers will step up and annotate more bugs. Should an embarrassment of riches result, we’ll have to sort out a reasonable means of whittling this list down to a manageable size (e.g. an age limit).
I’m curious to hear if anybody has thoughts on how we select good candidates.
The EclipseCon Europe 2015 Hackathon runs from noon on Tuesday, November 3rd until the end of the day on Wednesday, November 4th. We’re setting up office hours where you can meet and work with Eclipse committers (more on this later).