Hack Day Summary

Kevin Gullikson, among others

What is a Hack Day?

  • Get together with a bunch of people
  • Work in groups or alone on some project
  • Increasingly popular in astronomy: .Astronomy, #hackaas

Format of a Hack Day

  • Morning: everyone pitches their ideas/what they plan to work on. People working on similar things or who want to help with a specific project team up.
  • Most of the day:
  • End of the day: Present your results

What Went Down at This Hack Day?

  1. Put all of my random general-purpose scripts into a python package

    • CCF utilities
    • Spectral type relationships
    • Bayesian least squares fitter code (wraps emcee and MultiNest)

    pip install kglib

  2. Ivan made a tutorial notebook for his q2 code, and recruited 3 new users!

  3. Jacob, Aaron, and Alex packaged up Jacob's pyGadget code and set up Sphinx documentation. He also helped Jason visualize some simulation data using pyGadget.

  4. Kyle got TelFit running on his laptop and went through the tutorial I gave earlier in the week.

  5. Discovered how powerful anaconda and jupyter notebooks are (more on that later)

Reasons to Attend the Next Hack Day

(in no particular order)

  1. Collaboration: Even if you are working on your own project, if you run into a problem the first step can be to ask if anyone can help rather than googling the issue. This generally leads to a much faster solution.

  2. Side project completion: You can work on that little side project that you have been meaning to do forever but just can't find the time.

  3. Learn what's out there: We come up with very similar ideas all the time, so it's very likely that someone else has already done what you need, or knows that there is already a tool that will save you a lot of time.

Excuses for not Attending Hack Day:

  • "I have to work on my paper/project." Great! Do that in a collaborative environment. Ask for help rewording something. Ask people how a figure looks. Maybe even gain a new collaborator who knows how to do your analysis in a better way.

  • "I don't think I could help with a project."

    1. Yes you probably can. You don't have to spend 3 hours writing code and submitting a pull request to help. You just have to be there at the right time when someone else asks "does anyone know what X means?"
    2. See "I have to work on my paper/project." Working alone is fine too, and doing so in a new and collaborative environment will probably help.

  • "I have a meeting from 11-12 and a telecon from 2-3." As the name implies, Hack Day is a whole day thing, but you don't have to be there the entire time. Several attendees did this, in fact.

Next Hack Day

  • Spring break?
  • Probably not department-sponsored because I would feel bad submitting two late Cox proposals for the same thing.