DevCon 2018 in Lisbon is only six (6!) weeks away. As always, an important aspect of any Alfresco developer conference is the collaboration between members of the community, not just by sharing their knowledge, interesting use cases or innovations in the Alfresco ecosystem, but also by working on common problems, projects and ideas. Similar to the last BeeCon conference and the Alfresco Summit / DevCon events before, we are going to have a hack-a-thon before the main conference talks start, specifically on Tuesday, January 16th.
These in-presence, community hack-a-thon events offer a dedicated day of focussed collaboration, away from the distractions of the day-to-day tasks, away from meetings and (hopefully) away from emergency customer support calls. They provide an opportunity of working together with and maybe learning from other members of the community, all the while working towards a goal that may provide new value to the ecosystem around Alfresco. It does not matter wether you are a developer, sysadmin, end user or business analyst, if you work with Alfresco Content / Goverment / Process Services, or the Application Development Framework - everyone who attends DevCon can participate and offer their own ideas of tasks to be worked on. An end user or business analyst may want to work on improving documentation in the community platform, or compiling a draft of requirements or even concept for a missing functionality. Developers may work with sysadmins to improve tooling / integrations around the various products, or try their luck on an experimental implementation of an exciting, new feature. There are countless community addons being used by community members - may be you know of an addon that might need to be updated to a newer Alfresco version or that could be improved by processing some of their issues or pull requests.
When you are registering for DevCon, do not forget to specify your interest in participating in the hack-a-thon. If you have already registered without selecting the hack-a-thon, you can always change that afterwards by registering again and only selecting the hack-a-thon this time. We have more room available than we had at last year's BeeCon, so there is no reason to be shy thinking "I better leave that space for someone who is more into this".
Join us, work with us, have fun and become one of the many community members who already are "into this".
If you are planning to attend the hack-a-thon, please use the projects and teams document to list your project / task ideas, and/or register your interest in participation on any of the projects that have already been listed. As always, virtually any project idea goes as long as it is something that multiple people could work on together and which may benefit the open source community around the Alfresco products. Technical sales pitches or hands-on workshops are generally not a good idea for this event.
