What’s Scalathon?
Scalathon is an opportunity for the Scala community to come together and improve the Scala ecosystem over two jam packed days.
Scalathon is about code
Scalathon is collaborative
Scalathon is social
Scalathon may be for you if
- You’re looking to get involved in an exciting project.
- You’d like to improve your Scala by working with the best developers from around the world.
- You’re looking for new collaborators on your existing project.
- You think Scala could be better documented.
- You want to promote your awesome library.
Event outline
Saturday
Saturday we’ll be hacking all day, 9am-10pm. Throughout the day there will be short talks in the auditorium by representatives of various Scala projects. These talks are all about welcoming newcomers to the project. Many of these talks will:
- highlight bite-sized bugs appropriate for new contributors
- give a crash course on the project’s source code
- describe the project’s build-modify-distribute chain
We are hoping to provide breakfast and lunch, funding permitting.
At 10:00pm anyone with the energy can head over to a local pub for a happy hour.
Sunday
Sunday we’ll be hacking 9am-5pm. Throughout the day there will be enrichment talks in the auditorium. These won’t be the kind of academic talks you would see at Scala Days. Instead, they will focus on Scalathon’s goal of helping Scala developers contribute to the language and its libraries. Many Sunday talks will be tutorials on:
- advanced functional programming patterns
- Scala internals
- software best practices
- open source dynamics and community building
- essential software skills
We are hoping to provide breakfast and lunch, funding permitting.
Friday
Let’s be clear: everything about Friday, July 15 is optional and separate from the rest of the hackathon. That’s why it’s last in the list. If you can’t make Friday it won’t detract one iota from your hackathon experience.
On Friday from 12pm-2:30pm we’ll have a special meeting of Penn’s famous Programming Languages Club. Some Scala core developers will present on the formalization of Scala, followed by a catered lunch.
Then from 2:30pm-8pm we’ll have a documentation spree! We’ll be focusing on documenting the standard library, but you’re free to work on any documentation you’d like. This will be a smaller event than the weekend hackathon, so it’s a great opportunity to work more intimately with the Scala core team.
At 9pm we’ll have a functional programming quizzo with Philly Lambda at a local restaurant. If you’ve never heard of quizzo before, it’s a Philadelphia tradition of pub quizzes.
Note: To attend the special Programming Languages Club meeting or the documentation spree you must register on meetup.com. That’s a different registration than the weekend one. You do not need to register to attend the quizzo. It’s completely open.
Our suggestion on the talks …
… is to not go to them. Well, not too many of them. Remember, Scalathon is all about hacking, something you can’t do if you’re stuck in a lecture hall all day. All talks will be recorded and posted on Vimeo.com after the event. So our advice is to go to a couple talks each day and save the rest for home.
Acknowledgments: hackathon pictures CC from Flickr (1 2 3 4).