The second installment of the Hackergarten just took place this Friday, an excellent way to end the month and a working week if I may add. What is Hackergarten you ask? In brief, a group of people like you and me that come together to tackle a problem by hacking together. The first Hackergarten consisted of 8 people. Together they created an announce plugin for Gradle and submitted if that very night. I've been told that the plugin has been rolled into the upcoming 0.9 release, i.e. open source development rocks!

The second night wast Griffon night; we came together again to hack some Griffon plugins. Here's a summary of the whole experience in numbers

• 10 people joined the fray
• 5 1/2 hours of fun
• 4 teams worked shoulder to shoulder to produce 4 plugins
• 3 plugins were released:
  • JTreeMap - provides a JTreeMap component.
  • Notify - integrates desktop announcements via lib-notify (Ubuntu), Snarl (Windows), Growl (MacOSX).
  • Oxbow - provides a TaskDialog component
• The 4th plugin (DockingFrames) required a bit more of work than expected, however the team will be making a release soon.
• 8 pizzas gratuitously donated by our sponsor
• 3 bags of chips
• 1 bottle of red wine
• Too many beers to keep count
• 1 amazing sponsor (Canoo). Not only did they pay for the food and drinks, they also lend us the space and network. Thank you!

I'm eagerly awaiting the next event. Rumor has it that there might be a similar event during Gr8conf Copenhagen, so if you're attending make sure to show up and join the fun! In any case, if you're close to the Basel area then consider making the trip to join us next time; Hackergarten is a great way to meet other people and hack some code.

I'm also open to pair up and hack around a few hours with anybody that is interested in making plugins for Griffon and/or Grails; if you see me at any of these conferences then let's talk and code

Keep on Groovying!