Gr8Conf 2013 - Zero Conference Day

Gr8Conf [0] - a conference dedicated to the Groovy/Grails ecosystem - started for me with our arrival at the annual Hackergarten. The concept of Hackergartens has been introduced [1] a few year ago and now has arrived at several conferences and user groups around the world. It's about fun, hacking and contributing to open source projects. When we arrived at the Copenhagen IT University at 8pm (Hackergarten started at 7pm), almost all projects groups were formed, so we decided to create our own mixed Austrian/German group and had a look at the Grails currencies plugin [2]. Our task for this evening was to port this plugin to Grails 2.2. We added a few tests and fixed a minor bug, then our pull request was ready to go. Besides having a look at the plugin implementation, I learned some new things related to shell tools. One of them was Gibo [3], a little shell script that allows to access the .gitignore templates of github.com/github/gitignore and add them to a local/global .gitignore file. Another thing was Bitbucket [4], a web-hosting service for the Git and Mercural version control management systems, a tool I knew about but never had a look at. All in all, (again) the Hackergarten was a fun experience what I would not like to have missed. Now I am looking forward to visiting the two Gr8Conf conference days, starting with "The rise and fall of empires: Lessons for language designers and programmers" by Dr. Venkat Subranamiam [5]