COSIMA Hackathon v2.0 -- Tuesday January 24th, 2023

[mauricehuguenin (Maurice F. Huguenin)]

You should add the cake to the cosima recipes

[navidcy (Navid C. Constantinou)]

Concluding Remarks

• Participation 38 (18 @ Canberra, 14 @ Hobart, 6 @ Sydney)

• Already 16 Pull Requests related to the Hackathon v2.0 and a bunch more to come!
  Including

  • Beginner’s guide to the Cookbook
  • Beginner’s guide on how to make a contribution
  • automated testing of notebooks
  • Tutorial for using cf-xarray to make code model-agnostic!
  • MOM6 examples!
  • Kickstart on examples with regional models!

It was great! Some things worked well! Some things we can do better. I’ll put below some feedback we got about what worked and what could be done better. Please feel free to add! It would be a great resource for the Hackathon v3.0.

[navidcy (Navid C. Constantinou)]

What worked well

1. Engagement and participation
2. Excitement
3. We got things done!
4. … (please email me/msg me/ or reply to this thread and add more!)

[navidcy (Navid C. Constantinou)]

What could have been better

1. We pick one channel of communication.
2. We have a google doc forum thread or something that includes a summary of resources for those who are novice (e.g., repository urls, links to important posts related to the hackathon, links to beginner’s/contributor’s guide, etc.)
3. We start out with a very short introduction (so that people who already know what to do can get started) and then jump straight into the tutorials. (Those who were new most probably got lost in the first 30 mins discussing the tasks etc).
4. Ensure that people are assigned tasks via the hackathon project to avoid having two people working on the same task without them knowing about it.
5. Ensure that there is a dedicated helper floating around at each location.
6. Some hackathon sites didn’t have cake and they were jealous of others who did have.
7. Any dress up themes should be announced earlier to allow people to prepare costumes accordingly.
8. … (please email me/msg me/ or reply to this thread and add more!)

[Aidan (Aidan Heerdegen, ACCESS-NRI Release Team Lead)]

@navidcy

google doc or something

I vote for a forum topic as the “or something”. Google docs is not findable by search and could disappear.

And thanks again to @navidcy for organising and everyone who attended and made a great event

[Aidan (Aidan Heerdegen, ACCESS-NRI Release Team Lead)]

An unexpected outcome from @angus-g noticing and reporting a bug in cf_xarray as a result of the hackathon: Deepak Cherian asked if we could add a link to the model agnostic tutorial in the cf_xarray documentation.

This is a great demonstration of the benefits of being active participants in the open-source community. COSIMA has a great tool to make better software, but also gets some recognition and promotion, cf_xarray gets better documentation with more examples for users and a bug report they can fix. Win-win all round.