Friday, June 15, 2012

Berlin Hackathon


It's already mid-June and haven't written a blog post this month... Time goes way too fast!

End May / begin June I have been to the Berlin Hackathon.
I have been coding on planned parts of GSoC: the English language names in core and IncubatorFirstSteps (for WikimediaIncubator) and will commit them now.
I am getting more used to git/gerrit, and it is also very nice to have regular, rapid deployments of code, so once it's reviewed it's quickly available on Wikimedia wikis.

At the hackathon I also met User:Dereckson, who started an effort (in 2008) to create a Wikimedia Belgium chapter. Belgium is one of the few European countries without a chapter, and the idea has been there for years but the enthusiasm / initiative seems to be low. Nevertheless we are now trying to really start a Belgian chapter by next year.

I have also met Judy Tuan, who worked on a Wikipedia SMS application at the San Francisco hackathon. It's a really nice feature, you send an SMS with an article title and it calls you and reads the page content. We made it work for a few other languages in addition to English. Unfortunately it only works for US phone numbers.

I have also had exams, still only one to go next week.

And now Wikimania is less than a month away!

Regards
SPQRobin