illumos hackathon a resounding success

Yesterday we had our first ever illumos hack-a-thon. About a dozen people from the community showed up, and worked on some very very cool things. At the end of the day, about a half-dozen different demos were done, to show what was worked on.

We'll be posting photos shortly. But here are some of the projects that got attention:
  • tab completion for dcmds and data types in mdb
  • ::print for DTrace
  • expanded truss support for ZFS ioctls (nvlist expansion)
  • time-ordered output for DTrace
  • a comment field in the vdev label for ZFS pool devices
  • the ability to change the GUID of a ZFS pool
Several other projects were in progress.

We selected these projects out of a much larger list of project proposals (which I'll post soon), based on the what people thought was most useful, and the ability to achieve results in a single day hack-a-thon. (And what people we willing to either work on, or mentor.)

Most importantly, people got to work on areas that they weren't intimately familiar with, and work with mentors who were much more familiar. For my own part, I had a blast working with George Wilson to implement the ability to alter the GUID of a pool (which is going to have some further uses we can talk about later). My webrev of these changes is now on-line, so I welcome review feedback.

We had domain experts like Adam Leventhal, Matt Ahrens, Eric Schrock, George Wilson, Gordon Ross, and Dan McDonald on hand, to help mentor projects if they needed it, and the amount of cross fertilization was amazing.

While none of the actual code changes are absolutely earth-shattering, they are still very very cool, useful things, that many of us will be happy to have available. I'm already imagining several useful use cases for the ability to reguid a pool, for example. And I can't wait until I have ::print in DTrace and tab completion in mdb. These will make my life significantly better.

Ultimately, this was the most enjoyable coding experience I've had in a long time. I can't wait until we do it again!

Comments

Nigel W Smith said…
I wish I could have been a 'fly-on-the-wall' observing the hackathon,
and seeing/hearing all you guys at work. I'm sure it would have been fascinating.

I look forward to seeing the resulting code. And the photos and the full list of proposals...
October 26, 2011 at 4:16 AM
Anonymous said…
I wish I was there.

I could hack up something tiny too. :-)

Having experts on site in person is cool!

I've already dropped a hint here we should have local thing organized

I'm looking forward to see the photos and the full list of proposals...
October 28, 2011 at 5:26 AM
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