So a few weeks back a few of us flew into Melbourne to meet up with Jiri and other members from previous LCA conferences to discuss, program and work on zookeepr - the software that powers the conference.

Hackfest report:

On the weekend 23-25.5.2008 a zookeepr hackfest^[1] was held.

The zookeepr hackfest this last weekend was a great success :) . Myself and the LCA09 team really appreciate everybody's help, input and company during the weekend.

Attendees:

• Joshua Hesketh (2009)
• Josh Bush (2009)
• Jiří Baum (2008)
• John Ferlito (2007)
• James Iseppi
• also present for part of the time were Peter Lieverdink (2008), Donna Benjamin (2008), Ben Powell (2009), James Turnbull (2008).

The event was very generously held in the homes of Peter and Donna (Friday) and James Turnbull's (Saturday and Sunday).

We made a lot of progress discussing both long-term and 2009-specific changes and in cleaning up the code and working on CFPs and Registration. However the most valuable part of the weekend was being able to pick Jiri's and John's minds about the code.

Some notable changes:

• John F spent most of the weekend fixing up the testing suite for zookeepr (test coverage is now 36% overall) and making a new website for zookeepr.org
• James Iseppi and Jiri refactored code for account registrationand tied that into CFP's and Conference registration. James also cleaned out a lot of lca08 specific code
• Josh Bush fixed up all of the CSS and started validating the HTML. He also made things look sexy.
• Joshua Hesketh added a very (very) basic CMS for editing plain content pages and set up the menu and also continued moving hard coded stuff into configuration files
• Peter Linderdink and James Turnbull found typos and bugs and helped out where they could. (Including Peter making an algorithm for CFP review!).
• Ubuntu Hardy^[2] was agreed as the current target platform; nothing is now required to run zookeepr other than what's in the bzr repository and the Ubuntu Hardy packages listed in the INSTALL file.

Clearly on top of this work a lot of other bugs, code reworking and other stuff has happened :).

For those interested in hacking on zookeepr please note that the LCA09 branch is hosted on launchpad in my repository here:
https://code.launchpad.net/~joshua.hesketh/zookeepr/lca09
John is updating the zookeepr.org website to contain some more instructions on how to get started hacking. There is still lots to do for the conference, but expect linux.conf.au to be updated soon with some more information soon. If you are keen to help out and contribute towards conferences to come, shoot me an email: josh@nitrotech.org and I can help you out getting started and point you towards some tasks that need doing.

A few photos can be found on Josh B's flickr page here: http://flickr.com/photos/cheeseness/sets/72157605311163915/

LCA is scheduled the 19th - 24th of January next year and we hope to see all of you in Hobart for the 10th installment of the world's best open source conference.

Let me know if you have any questions :-)!

1.

A hackfest is where programmers program and rock out

2.

Please, no distro wars! Hardy was chosen for it's LTS and recent libraries which make for easy maintenance.