Zürich 24.05 ZHF Hackathon
On the last weekend of May 2024, the Zürich Friends of Nix hosted a two-day hackathon around the Zero Hydra Failures release preparations for NixOS 24.05 at Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (OST) right next to Lake Zürich.
Background and preparations
This is the fourth such event in a row. It’s designed to encourage people to get to know each other, hack on everything Nix, and shape the future of open source together.
Since the marketing team’s 2024 community survey got delayed and we thus didn’t manage to gather broader feedback on the results from the November 2023 UX workhop, we decided to not to pursue the workshop track this time around. This coincided with participant feedback, which indicated a desire for a more relaxed schedule and more opportunities to mingle and write code.
Event
The event took place in two large classroom and the hallway connecting them. It spanned Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00.
We had 20 attendees on Saturday and 16 on Sunday, once again arriving from all over Europe. We were very happy to welcome first-time participants, regulars such as @gefla @das-g, and Nixpkgs maintainers @infinisil, @roberth, and @imincik who were around to share their expertise.
On Saturday:
We then went on to address various issues attendees had brought or dug up, and discussed various technical issues around architecture, documentation, and coding conventions. It definitely helped to have four people with merge permissions in the room, which allowed contributors to get their change proposals reviewed, improved, and merged on the spot.
Following popular demand, on Sunday @ners held an impromptu seminar on setting up Haskell projects with Nix, teaching beginners and refreshing intermediates on basics of purely functional programming.
Over the weekend, the group created 20 and closed 15 issues or pull requests, with the event series now totalling at 68 created and 48 concluded contributions.
Saturday’s hacking was made even more enjoyable with organisers supplying Poke Bowls for lunch. The day ended with a group photo at the lake, and part of the group went on to have dinner together.
On Sunday, Zürich friend of Nix Cazim (@cyhsi) enchanted everyone with his outdoor Wok cuisine for an extended lunch break in the lake park.
Acknowledgements
This event was made possible by Prof. Dr. Farhad Mehta, professor of informatics at the OST, by accommodating us in a large, modern computer room with a beautiful lake view. Thanks a lot to Raphael Das Gupta (@das-g) for your support with the venue.
Tweag, the Modus Create Open Source Program Office lead by Mathieu Boespflug (@mboes), and Antithesis, thanks to their ongoing sponsoring, enabled @infinisil and @fricklerhandwerk to participate as part of their work on the Nix ecosystem.
Thanks to all the participants for your attendance and active involvement, and for providing detailed feedback on the event so we can make it even better next time.
And last but not least, many thanks to release NixOS 24.05 release managers @wegank and @Mic92 for another great edition of our favorite Linux distribution!
Looking ahead
The next event is already in the making, save the date:
Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th of November 2024
Looking forward to more hacking, snacking, knowledge sharing, and improving Nix for everyone!
For next time we intend to double down on enabling more people to contribute, welcoming new members to the community, better learning to know each other, and working on hard problems together. You can reach us via:
to stay up to date with planning and preparations.