Today, the Hyland Alfresco TechQuest in Lisbon is only a month away. While the Alfresco community has had virtual hack-a-thons and virtual Alfresco Days during the Covid pandemic, as well as physical Hyland Summits since then, TechQuest will be the first developer-focussed in-person event since the Alfresco DevCon 2019 in Edinburgh - 5 years and 7 months ago. During this time, Alfresco has gone through significant changes, starting with the acquisition by Hyland in 2020. As with many transitions, this has caused reason for concern for many long-term members of the Alfresco developer community, especially since Hyland did not arrive on the scene with any tradition of being an open source or community focussed company. What level of support the open source developer community of Alfresco would receive in the long run seemed uncertain for far longer than many of us might have preferred.
Given this uncertainty and the long time without a developer-centric event, I was very happy and excited when Hyland approached me around the end of spring with initial information about their TechQuest event and an invitation to collaborate with them on the Thursday hack-a-thon specifically. Though it may be tempting to try and compare TechQuest with the memory of Alfresco DevCons or Summits of the past, I find it more appropriate to think of it as the first step in a "reboot". With any reboot - whether in movie franchises or tech communities - there will be aspects people like and aspects on which they disagree.
In all the preliminary calls to which I have been invited, I was pleased to find a very open mindset and constructive atmosphere with all the Hyland people involved. In addition to the specifics for this hackathon, we have also had good discussions on some of my questions around a long-term strategy for the Alfresco open source community, including potential future events beyond TechQuest. While I had never doubted that veteran Alfrescian Angel Borroy would be a strong advocat for the open source community within Hyland, it was very encouraging to finally meet and get to know the Hyland PMs and colleagues working with him who are just as eager to work with members of our community to improve the state of it.
As with past in person events and conferences, TechQuest and its hack-a-thon provide the best opportunity to network not just with other members of the Alfresco open source community, but also with Hyland project managers, engineers, and their community team. Whether during breaks, while working in the hackathon, or in a more social setting before or after the event, there will be plenty of chances to hang out and pick a discussion with anyone - if you so desire. Of course the technical training tracks on their own should already be illuminating on various topics from AI to out-of-process extensions or migrations to newer technological solutions for search and processes.
As one of the masters of ceremony for the hack-a-thon on Thursday, I especially hope you will join us in this long-running Alfresco tradition. While hack-a-thons in other communities may sometimes have a slight competetive edge to them, the Alfresco hack-a-thons are always purely cooperative and open to anyone, not just coders. During this event, you can work on any project that may be of interest to you, outside the confines of your customer or commercial projects. Whether you want to create or update guides for using some features or addons for an Alfresco project, experiment with a new integration, test and fix existing addons for the newest releases of Alfresco products, or just want to try out something you picked up during TechQuest - anything is fair game.
If you want to join the hack-a-thon, remember to register for it on the TechQuest event page and check out any of the projects already suggested by members of the community. When you are interested in picking up any of the ideas, join a team, or add your own ideas, you can provide a pull request on that GitHub project to add your name or idea in the README.md file. This will become more and more relevant the closer we get to the event. Of course you can join without having picked a project idea, and see what topics or ideas pique your interest on the day of the event.
Typically we will have a short presentation of the results at the end of the hack-a-thon for anyone participating on the day. Additionally, attendees are often invited into the next Tech Talk Live (TTL) to showcase their projects for the wider Alfresco community, and in a potentially more polished state. A number of projects of previous hack-a-thons turned out to be the starting point for the development of some well known tools or addons in the community, and the Tech Talk Live may help your project to find users or contributors to start on a similar road - or can help you extend your network by getting feedback from other community members interested in the same kind of topic that you worked on.
If you have any questions about the hack-a-thon at any time before or during the event, you can contact either me or Angel Borroy directly, and we will see in what way we can support you. While we will likely also work on ideas of our own during the hack-a-thon, as masters of ceremony, our main goal is to ensure you have the best experience during the event or help connect you with any other attendee who may want to collaborate or otherwise be able to support you in achieving your goal for your hack-a-thon project.
I look forward to seeing you in Lisbon and working with you to make the hack-a-thon a memorable and productive event for all of us.
