I survived LibreOffice Hackfest 2012 in Hamburg!

The LibreOffice Hackfest 2012 in Hamburg was an exhausting, exciting and awesome experience. We started on Friday, 13th in the Schachcafe over some Lanedo sponsored beer collecting all the Hackers flying in/riding in by train/returning from some downtown sightseeing. We also picked up some old StarDivision/Sun Developer hanging around by accident just there -- since all hackers are curious, the invitation to join us on the next day too was gladly accepted. Saturday started with a good breakfast and distributing the cool shirts that Nerdshirt.de kindly sponsored us (Saturday also started with Thorsten kindly inviting me to speed up my steps to the event location for the amusement of the hackers already there -- over megaphone):

The shirts, posters and pens quickly found their new owners once hackers were made aware of them -- and off we went for a session of full-throttle hackery. I practiced my skills as a jack of all trades, master of none and jumped from topic to topic:

• discussed bibisect/QA with Florian (remotely attending via Skype), Rainer, Friedrich and Rob, resulting in this awesome screencast
• Simplifying login and authentication on TDF services with Mike and the infrastructure guys (OpenID should be the way to go)
• some cross compile gbuild tweaking with Eilidh
• how branching works in git with Christina
• Moggi kindly reminding me that when I joined the project, everyone had to be nice to me because only I knew how gbuild worked, but now we have so many with a deep knowledge about it (Norbert, Matus, Michael Stahl, David to name a few) that I am replaceable -- somewhat uncomforting that, I should have made gbuild more write-only
• Earned myself two Windows configure bugs by Regina
• Eating tasty pasta prepared by Italo
• discussed Ubuntu ppa strategy with Mike
• discussed gerrit progress with Robert and Norbert (attending remotely -- the volunteer that never sleeps)
• proved with Tor that both of us together qualify as a four year old preschooler by solving a riddle that kids solve easily while adults struggle (kendy proved that he qualifies alone, while moggi disqualified himself as a preschooler -- his higher math education proved to be a real handicap)
• jumped in for a few minutes to give hints to Andreas on how to edit the PDF export dialog
• lots of other topics ...

Saturday ended with a sip of bavarian single malt whiskey (which tasted better than it sounds: it got a "not too terrible" by a scottish native and no outright dismissing by a trained grappa tester) at 4am local time. Then I returned back home with now three couchsurfers (I won Robert in addition, as we discussed gerrit to late for him to possibly return to his reserved couch). Sunday continued with what began on Saturday. We managed to lure some of the remaining hackers into the sunlight with promises of fortune and fame:

as you can see some of the sponsored black shirts with the hacker glider are already worn right there. As things got calmer, because more and more hackers returned home, I managed to focus myself on one topic and implemented an small idea proposed to me by Tor: Per Library debug builds.

(for more, see also: Thorstens post and all the others linked in there)

This was originally published at 2012-04-16 19:43:00/2012-04-16 19:43:00 on livejournal.