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News & Announcements

afaust
Master

Today, the Hyland Alfresco TechQuest in Lisbon is only a month away. While the Alfresco community has had virtual hack-a-thons and virtual Alfresco Days during the Covid pandemic, as well as physical Hyland Summits since then, TechQuest will be the first developer-focussed in-person event since the Alfresco DevCon 2019 in Edinburgh - 5 years and 7 months ago. During this time, Alfresco has gone through significant changes, starting with the acquisition by Hyland in 2020. As with many transitions, this has caused reason for concern for many long-term members of the Alfresco developer community, especially since Hyland did not arrive on the scene with any tradition of being an open source or community focussed company. What level of support the open source developer community of Alfresco would receive in the long run seemed uncertain for far longer than many of us might have preferred.

Given this uncertainty and the long time without a developer-centric event, I was very happy and excited when Hyland approached me around the end of spring with initial information about their TechQuest event and an invitation to collaborate with them on the Thursday hack-a-thon specifically. Though it may be tempting to try and compare TechQuest with the memory of Alfresco DevCons or Summits of the past, I find it more appropriate to think of it as the first step in a "reboot". With any reboot - whether in movie franchises or tech communities - there will be aspects people like and aspects on which they disagree.

In all the preliminary calls to which I have been invited, I was pleased to find a very open mindset and constructive atmosphere with all the Hyland people involved. In addition to the specifics for this hackathon, we have also had good discussions on some of my questions around a long-term strategy for the Alfresco open source community, including potential future events beyond TechQuest. While I had never doubted that veteran Alfrescian Angel Borroy would be a strong advocat for the open source community within Hyland, it was very encouraging to finally meet and get to know the Hyland PMs and colleagues working with him who are just as eager to work with members of our community to improve the state of it.

As with past in person events and conferences, TechQuest and its hack-a-thon provide the best opportunity to network not just with other members of the Alfresco open source community, but also with Hyland project managers, engineers, and their community team. Whether during breaks, while working in the hackathon, or in a more social setting before or after the event, there will be plenty of chances to hang out and pick a discussion with anyone - if you so desire. Of course the technical training tracks on their own should already be illuminating on various topics from AI to out-of-process extensions or migrations to newer technological solutions for search and processes.

As one of the masters of ceremony for the hack-a-thon on Thursday, I especially hope you will join us in this long-running Alfresco tradition. While hack-a-thons in other communities may sometimes have a slight competetive edge to them, the Alfresco hack-a-thons are always purely cooperative and open to anyone, not just coders. During this event, you can work on any project that may be of interest to you, outside the confines of your customer or commercial projects. Whether you want to create or update guides for using some features or addons for an Alfresco project, experiment with a new integration, test and fix existing addons for the newest releases of Alfresco products, or just want to try out something you picked up during TechQuest - anything is fair game.

If you want to join the hack-a-thon, remember to register for it on the TechQuest event page and check out any of the projects already suggested by members of the community. When you are interested in picking up any of the ideas, join a team, or add your own ideas, you can provide a pull request on that GitHub project to add your name or idea in the README.md file. This will become more and more relevant the closer we get to the event. Of course you can join without having picked a project idea, and see what topics or ideas pique your interest on the day of the event.

Typically we will have a short presentation of the results at the end of the hack-a-thon for anyone participating on the day. Additionally, attendees are often invited into the next Tech Talk Live (TTL) to showcase their projects for the wider Alfresco community, and in a potentially more polished state. A number of projects of previous hack-a-thons turned out to be the starting point for the development of some well known tools or addons in the community, and the Tech Talk Live may help your project to find users or contributors to start on a similar road - or can help you extend your network by getting feedback from other community members interested in the same kind of topic that you worked on.

If you have any questions about the hack-a-thon at any time before or during the event, you can contact either me or Angel Borroy directly, and we will see in what way we can support you. While we will likely also work on ideas of our own during the hack-a-thon, as masters of ceremony, our main goal is to ensure you have the best experience during the event or help connect you with any other attendee who may want to collaborate or otherwise be able to support you in achieving your goal for your hack-a-thon project.

I look forward to seeing you in Lisbon and working with you to make the hack-a-thon a memorable and productive event for all of us.

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EddieMay
Alfresco Employee

Alfresco consultancy, Venzia IT, worked on a hackathon project to improve the ACA search experience. Read how they got on.

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Alfresco Employee

Read how Adrien Suavez produced a GraphQL endpoint for Alfresco.

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During Hackathon Tom Page took the opportunity to write about managing public access to company prvate Git repositories. Read how community mirroring works.

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EddieMay
Alfresco Employee

Jeff Potts worked on two projects during Hackathon, updating his acclaimed Alfresco Developer Series Tutorials, and a Markdown Transformer. Read how he got on.

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EddieMay
Alfresco Employee

TietoEvry set out to automate Garbage Collection log analysis and display the results in Alfresco. Read about how they got on.

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EddieMay
Alfresco Employee

Angel works at Alfresco as a search engineer and during hackathon he worked on a number of projects. Read more about the projects Angel was involved in.

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EddieMay
Alfresco Employee

May 11, 2020 saw the DevCon hackathon take place as a virtual event. The ‘follow the sun’ hackathon produced a number of notable projects, more of which later.

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EddieMay
Alfresco Employee

I'm pleased to announce the Alfresco 2020 Hack-a-thon, is taking place on Monday,  11 May 2020 from 09:00 UTC+10. You are all invited to join in!

Alfresco Global Virtual Hack-a-thons are open to everyone in the Alfresco community. While there typically is a large percentage of attendees who are developers, we also like to see end-users, managers and other people interested in Alfresco and its ecosystem of products (Content Services, Process Services, Governance Services, Application Development Framework, Digital Workspace, Activiti Cloud etc.). The projects being worked on during the event can also focus on any kind of technical to non-technical topic, such as enhancing documentation or defining business requirements for critically missing feaures to be discussed / passed on to Alfresco. The more technical people in the event also welcome the opportunity to be exposed to different perspectives on the way Alfresco can be used to solve problems, or to get constructive feedback on the projects they are working on at the event.

Attending an Alfresco Global Virtual Hack-a-thon should also not be hindered by your specific location or time zone. With no specific city / locality where the hack-a-thon takes place, people use various digital tools to connect and collaborate on a global scale, e.g. by using Discord, Zoom or Skype web sessions. The event typically lasts between 24 and 27 hours (best was around 30) using the follow the sun principle. We start early in the morning for attendees in Oceania and East Asia and go on until ideally the last people in the Americas stop to work on their projects. Anyone can join and leave at any time of the day whichever fits best their schedule.

Project Ideas

As always, we are using a Google Form to register,  list and coordinate project ideas for the Global Virtual Hack-a-thon in advance of the event. Everyone with a specific idea is free to register it on this form, even if they may not be able to attend the event themselves. Other interested parties can add their names to the ideas, and use comments or other communication means to discuss and refine those ideas further. On the day of the event, this also helps to point any new participants who may not have an idea about what to do yet to projects already in progress or waiting to be picked up.

With less than a month to go until the event, I want to invite everyone in the community to start thinking about what you would consider useful things / ideas to be work on / enhanced. Ideally, we have a list of a half a dozen or more ideas until the week before the event, when people can start to more specifically prepare for the projects they want to work on, e.g. get familiar with existing code if continueing an existing project or simply just coordinating who will join at what time in their teams.

Going forward the list of project ideas will be published here on the Hub.

Hacker Rooms

Given the global pandemic, there will be no physical rooms as in previous hack-a-thons.

Questions

Any questions about the hack-a-thon can be directed to Axel Faust or Ole Hejlskov‌. 

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