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OpenBSD hackathons

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151 pointsjorgecastillo27 comments

OpenBSD hackathons are why I'm so bummed by the corporate-sponsored "hackathons" that are often organized at my university: instead of improving a major open source project that is of use to everyone (including people in academia), it's mostly about "please test our API and show us the cool thing we could build with it". I absolutely adore the focus that OpenBSD hackathons have and how they benefit the whole community.

You have to pay off your student loans somehow -- participating in (and these days, running) a corporate-sponsored hackathon is a nice way to pad a res^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H demonstrate technical and leadership skills if you're looking for a megacorp job.

Not everyone can say they won the Putnam.

It 'pads your resume' by showing a willingness to do unpaid work for for-profit corporations, which potential employers love.

Putnams don't count for much anyway; I guarantee you 99% of tech companies are still going to put you through the same demeaning interview process even if you have one, just because they can.

To take it a step further than "test our API and show us the cool thing we could build with it", I think it's also "you young, bright programmers, show us which of you is willing to work yourselves to death for whatever arbitrary tasks we assign you".

I may be a bit too cynical, but there's some element of that in those sponsored hackathons as well.

Yep. OpenBSD practically invented the concept of a hackathon as a way of bringing together their distributed developer base to work together on OpenBSD in a convivial atmosphere.

Then entryist tech companies co-opted the concept to get programmers to work for free on their platforms, and in some cases to even pay money (in the form of an entry or registration fee) for the privilege of doing so.

Sure, they provide pizza and dangle some prizes in front of the participants, but the judging is seldom objective, and the winners are all too often connected in some way to the event sponsor.

Sun introduced the techcorp use of 'Hackathon' at about the same time as OpenBSD ran theirs (Java One and OpenBSD Hackathon both in June 1999).

It was probably a coincidence, no attempt at co-opting anything.

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

No YC, no Sequoia, no Andreessen Horowitz or other major VC, despite VC-backed companies often using OSS exclusively, and VCs being awash in cash and likely also being clued-in enough to actually realize just how much they rely on OSS: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Marc-Andreessen-The-Clock...

I wasn't expecting to see Microsoft being a gold sponsor in 2015. Good on them. Glad to see The Core Infrastructure Initiative supporting important projects beyond Linux as well.

I'm actually surprised how small and how few donations there are from big companies. Especially since donations to openssh (and libressl) also seem to go through the openbsd foundation. IIRC Facebook and stripe are each giving $50k/year to the gpg project. No big tech company other than Microsoft is donating more than $25k to openbsd foundation (unless there are other means of donating that I'm missing).

I love the focus on a particular topic or theme. "Reduce code fat!" for example. I've been to far too many general hackathons where the scope was so broad that the productivity of the hackathon itself was minimal, or even zero.

Is the goal of those broad hackathons not to encourage new ideas rather than make bulk progress on a pre-defined roadmap?

The question is though: would you prefer a) a half-baked feature where coding is 1/10th of the effort and you're still left with 9/10th of the work for the maintainer/community or b) a small, but undeniable improvement?

OpenBSD would obviously prefer the latter, but other hackathons are sometimes for the purpose of just generating new ideas or getting new people involved - in those cases broad scope is good and intentional.

I'd kill for one of those UTF-8 shirts.

http://www.openbsd.org/images/hackathons/u2k15.gif

But why?! )

Well killing someone and taking it is probably the only way to get one.

The lower right-hand of that image, where they use the symbols for when a glyph is missing was seriously clever.

I'd kill for this t-shirt too. Let's gang up on someone and take their shirts.

I'm happy to hear you like the shirt. A friend of mine (not an OpenBSD committer) rendered this shirt with a few hundred lines of python.

So... one way to get an OpenBSD hackathon shirt without actually attending a hackathon is to design a shirt! This way, you don't have to kill anyone. Which means you likely get to wear the shirt outside of prison :)

This is the shirt I would kill for https://www.eff.org/files/images_insert/defcon20-script-kitt... If you have one in medium please let me know what transgressions I have to commit for it.

I made it, inspired by stsp, while frying in the sun at the https://events.ccc.de/camp/2015

I (still) dearly hope none of the foreign glyphs say anything that I don't like ... that would be by accident.

Can you spot a pile of poo? ;)

Hi neeels :)

Well.. if you enjoyed the hackathon artwork.

http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html

Hacker culture personified. Programming / Hacking is art and with songs and logos for each release it makes this more creative.

openbsd has great art

the canadian os

the B stands for Berkeley, California

theo is canadian, and lives in calgary

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