Author: sshaw

This is a really cool idea that Nat came up with. The idea is that all the Linux engineers in the company stop what they are doing for a week and get to work on whatever they want. Kind of like a google thing but for a whole week. Unfortunately, there a some big things that have to get taken care of otherwise I would be joining them this week even though I don’t have those mad elite hacking skillz. Hopefully the next time around I’ll be able to participate. In the announcement there is the link to the website which has pictures and videos already. Hopefully some really cool stuff comes out of this. You can also add your ideas and contribute from your own desk from the website.

Here is the announcement for the event from Nat on the openSuSE announce list:

Hi everyone,

At Novell we’ve been planning a special internal event that will run
this week, from June 25th to 29th. We’re calling it Hack Week.

During Hack Week, our entire Linux engineering team — hundreds of
people — will be working on whatever Linux or open source projects
interest them. Everyone will work alone or in teams, on existing open
source projects or new ideas of their own. No one will tell them what
or what not to do — it’s a free week for free hacking, driven by
individual passion.

To make it easier for our hackers to find and publicize their projects,
we’ve created an Idea Pool web site where we’ve all spent the last
couple of weeks sharing ideas and finding collaborators. This web site
is open to the public here:

http://idea.opensuse.org/

Although this is a Novell event, we’re running it with full
transparency. You’ll be able to follow our progress and projects on the
Idea Pool web site, either with the blog on the front page where we’ll
post videos from our seven main engineering sites[1], or by watching
individual project pages.

We invite you to participate where you can. If you’d like to help with
a project, feel free to add a comment to the discussion section of the
page and volunteer your support.

We hope that you’ll at least enjoy watching Hack Week progress. If it
is successful, we hope to run it again sometime soon, with even more
participation from the community.

If you’re interested in following along, you might check the following
sites first:

-Hack Week Overview: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/hackweek

-Tags: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/blog/welcome-to-the-idea-pool

-Idea Pool code of conduct: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/etiquette

-Flickr pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/hackweek/pool/

During the week, we’ll use the channel #opensuse-hackweek on
irc.freenode.net for general discussion (project-specific discussion
will find its own venue). Hope to see you there!

Happy hacking,
Nat

[1] Beijing, Bangalore, Prague, Nuernberg, Boston, Provo, Portland are
the main sites

At the end of last week we had a meeting that everyone from a couple groups had to attend. The main purpose of this meeting was to meet some of the upper management that is traveling from building to building within the company throughout the world. Didn’t expect it, but Andreas Jaeger is part of that upper management, not that he shouldn’t be. After the meeting, I decided that I had to go up and at least say hi(that and for the bragging rights 🙂 ). So, I went up and was able to meet and shake hands with him for a couple minutes. For those of you that do not know who Andreas is, he is the head guy over the openSuSE distribution. His is one of the blogs that I follow on and off (http://andreasjaeger.blogspot.com/). You can always catch him in the openSuSE irc meetings and on the openSuSE mailing lists. From the few times that I’ve read the meeting transcripts and his blog, he seems like a really cool and down to earth kind of guy. I was also impressed when talking to him in person. Thinking about it, I’m just some peon intern and he didn’t really have to take a couple minutes to talk to me. None the less he did.