September 23, 2014 From rOpenSci (https://deploy-preview-488--ropensci.netlify.app/blog/2014/09/23/nceas-codefest-follow-up/). Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under the CC-BY license.
The week after labor day, we had the pleasure of attending the NCEAS open science codefest event in Santa Barbara. It was great to meet folks like the new arrivals at the expanding Mozilla Science Lab, Bill Mills and Abby Cabunoc (Bill even already has a great post up about the codefest), and see old friends from NCEAS and DataONE, among many more. This 2.5 day event ran smoothly thanks to the leadership of Matt Jones. The event was run in unconference style. Each idea was then posted up on a giant post it on the wall and people had 30 minutes to wander the room choosing projects. The approach allowed for a consensus based filtering of ideas. We had the opportunity to suggest some ideas, and a chance to help out with others. Here’s an overview of the projects the rOpenSci team worked on and what we accomplished at the open science codefest.
One great thing about this event was mixing more experienced programmers with less experienced ones. In addition to making software, there was a fair amount of training going on. For example, a few people were interested in how to make an R package, so we went through the whole process with pangear, and now we have 5 awesome contributors on the package. Overall we had a great time, were able to begin some new projects, and contribute to some important existing ones. We hope to continue to build out what we started at codefest and integrate it into our existing tool set and workflows.