QA Hackathon in Israel

In the last week I have been quite busy with kick-starting the organization of the conference and the a hackathon next to it.

About the conference I have already written a bit in OSDC Israel 2009 - Call for organizers, so let's write about the hackathon.

In April, 2009 I participated in the Oslo QA Hackathon which was a pretty interesting event. Many of the leading figures of the Perl QA community gathered for three days in Oslo to work on some projects.

On the hackathon that will take place in February 2009 in Israel I am planning to put people from various languages together. My original thought was to invite QA people from the Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP and Javascript communities so they can work out issues with integration. Wether it is TAP based or not, that's another question.

Then a few suggestions came in to include people from the Java and .NET world as well. We'll see how do we manage that.

Then came another suggestion that is quite interesting. Misha Seltzer, one of the local Python developers suggested to try to work on local - Middle East related - issues. More specifically to work on Hebrew, Arabic and in general bidi related testing issues.

I think this is an excellent idea and I hope some of the people who attend the hackathon will be able to work on those issues as well.

In Oslo too, we had several topics. Some people were involved in their own projects while others were going around and chipping in every place they could.

While on the first two days it seemed very hard to get other than Perl people to respond, it seems that things started to move.

We already have several international Perl, two PHP people, some local Pythoners interested and the first Ruby bird has just landed :-)

I think I go to sleep now.