Hello all,
We are planning a remote hackathon for Galaxy tool developers to hack on dataset collections. Dataset collections enable MapReduce style workflows in Galaxy and have come a long way over the last year+. Several groups are using dataset collections and newer tools to express workflows of various degrees of complexity that were not possible in Galaxy before.
The remote nature of this should give people who don't have the opportunity to come to GCC hackathons (which have always been productive and a lot of fun) a chance to participate in a Galaxy hackathon. Hopefully having a well defined topic will allow us to accomplish a lot and let people who don't have particular tasks in mind find something to work on very quickly.
We have been collecting ideas to work on here - https://github.com/galaxyproject/tools-iuc/issues/239, but we expect to attract the most participation by simply getting tool developers interested in getting help adding collection support to their existing tools and workflows to show up and participate.
If you are interested in participating in the hackathon but not interested in actual tool development - we will assemble a list of smaller, manageable Python and JavaScript tasks to work on and certainly documentation is a chronically lacking for collections so we could use help there and no actual coding would be required.
This is the first remote hackathon we have organized and we encourage ideas or advice about how to organize it please let us know. We are currently thinking a two day event in which a core group of us would be available on IRC all day and we would have 4 google hangouts across those days to organize, answer questions, and report progress. We are also currently thinking September 17th and 18th.
Thanks, Galaxy IUC