Post Slackathon Wrap up

It seems an eternity ago now, but just last weekend a very special event occurred: we held the inaugural Stupid-Ideas Powershell Slackathon, where people from around the planet came together to build and share frivolous things with Powershell.

You like numbers? Here's the numbers:

• 87 people asked to join the Slackathon and were sent slack invitations.
• 71 of those people answered their invitations and joined the slack site.

On the actual weekend people contributed:

• 35 separate folders of powershell code that are publicly available for your reading pleasure (detailed below).
• 45 files within the slack group (snippets, images, etc)

The publicly available contributions came from 14 different people.

One thing that surprised me was that some people didn't talk in slack at all, but quietly contributed really interesting code, which spoke volumes.

There were also 7 "profile.ps1" files that people chose to make available. These are great reading for anyone who lives by the slogan:

Live fast, die young, leave a well maintained profile.ps1 file.

And there are prizes! Prizes, yes!

People seemed to contribute for the sake of contributing, so I don't want to over-emphasize the prizes. Any contribution is a thrill. In the end I went ahead and sent a NimbleText Bundle (NimbleText + NimbleSET) to every one who contributed public code.

But to award the other sponsored prizes, I put all of the contributions (see below) into a spreadsheet and assessed them all on a range of criteria. After much deliberation, here's how the remaining prizes are distributed:

Prize for Slackathon Fever

The 'slackathon fever' prize was awarded for most contributions and highest points total. The prize for this is a copy of Douglas Finke's book: Windows Powershell for Developers (O'Reilly).

I have the envelope here. The winner is...

It's a tie! Two people with the same number of contributions and equivalent overall score:

Prateek Singh and Douglas Finke!

Well, I suspect Doug already has a copy of his own book. But he will now have to send a copy to Prateek as well.

So Wrong It's Right!

The 'so wrong it's right' prize is for misuse of technology. This was hotly contested, and I was torn between a few. I ended up awarding it to a very deserving though simple entrant: Ken Erwin, with his Favorite Drink script.

Unless the team from Chocolatey issue a protest, Ken will receive a Chocolatey Pro license.

The Toppest of the Top!

This is the big one, the toppest of the top prize also brings a Chocolatey Pro License, but on top of that you get a profound sense of shame and a permanent blotch on your resume. The winner of this was Glenn Sarti for 'Ascii Art Conversions'.

Finally, here's a list of all the contributions and who to blame. (If you want your name redacted just send me 15 bitcoin)

I wanted to write down everything I learnt, but life is just too short to dig into all that.

A few of the salient points...

Floobits is an OK place to allow people to contribute. There's a few confusing things about floobits that we had to explain over and over, now listed here.

A better name (e.g. workshop instead of hackathon), a more diverse group of organizer, and a clear code of conduct up front might've improved the diversity of the event. On gender diversity for example the event was a failure.

Slack worked really well. Avoid the temptation of playing with slack too much... you could lose days doing that if you're not careful.

Cross time-zone issues were terrible, for me in Australia at least. I basically acquired jet lag.

That's all I've got time for.

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