At past THATCamps, I’ve had the most fun when I’ve ditched the official sessions (as “official” as THATCamp sessions can be) to do some organized messing around. Last year, it took the form of sitting down with a couple of my One Week | One Tool buddies and hacking away at Anthologize for a few hours.
So, in the spirit of goofing off semi-aimlessly, maybe we could:
- Pick a free software project with a public bug tracker (Omeka? WordPress? Anthologize? etc) and submit some patches/pull requests.
- If there are folks who have wanted to get started contributing to free software projects but haven’t had the right setup, I could help them set up dev environments, and maybe we could talk a bit about the culture of open source development.
- We could pick some small project and roll our own One Afternoon | One Tool
The spirit here is that I work alone most of the time, so it would be fun to do some co-working with smart and cool people. Also, messing around is inherently the bomb.
I can commit to this.
We have even already reserved a whole space and time for messing around! It’s called “the dev table” (aka “CHNM dedicated hackerspace” on the schedule) and “all weekend” (aka “all weekend”). Patrick and I are also (in a goofing off kind of way) putting together a hackathon of some sort, defining a project or two that people can mess around with if they want, but that won’t interfere with any other messing around that people want to do.
Just hope I get a peaceful hour or so to join in. I need to mess around with Chapter 5 of my Learning PHP book, is what I need to mess around with.
I would join a PHP messing around session. I think if I new more PHP, there are fun things I could do with my site that I am not currently doing!
I’ll be planning to do some hacking, and as much as I can play host in the hackerspace!