Announced last week at the JavaOne blog, this year's JavaOne will run a new kind of event: the JavaOne Codegarten. What is a Codegarten? Well it's basically the same as Hackergarten but with a more "politically correct" name 
This means if you have previously participated in a Hackergarten session and are also attending JavaOne, you have to make it to Codegarten, it's tons of fun! On the other hand, if you're new to Codegarten/Hackergarten allow me to list a few reasons why it's a good idea to block a few hours of your schedule to attend this meeting.
- The goal of the session is to contribute back to FOSS projects, no matter the language, no matter the size, no matter the type of contribution; basically everything goes!
- Regular Hackergarten sessions last between 4 to 6 hours. Codegarten is 16.5 hours, spanning 3 days!
- We often work in a pair programming fashion thus encouraging communication.
- Many times during sessions you hear of "aha!" moments when someone discovers a new IDE shortcut because one of his team mates showed it to him.
- Project leads and contributors are always in attendance. Here's your chance to mingle and learn from them!
Just to name some of the contributions made during past sessions:
- The notify gradle plugin (during our first session back in 2010).
- Speaking of Gradle, the asciidoctor gradle plugin, initiated at JFokus this year.
- The @Log (and siblings) Groovy AST transformation at Gr8conf 2011.
- Fluentlinium and Arquillian integration during Devoxx 2012.
- A gradle-link command target expansion to the Griffon buildtime (Jazoon); later ported to Grails as well.
- Dolphin.js; the javascript client library for OpenDolphin.
- A @Transactional AST transformation for Grails (Gr8conf).
- Several contributions to Groovy, Grails, Griffon, GroovyFX, Spock, Ratpack.
- ScalaFX updates during Devoxx 2011.
You may have picked up a trend: there's plenty of Groovy related projects in there. Does this mean you're required to know Groovy? Not at all! (but it wouldn't hurt because Groovy is great fun to work with). The reason behind this trend is quite simple: we love the Groovy and we like contributing back to it. Now for the JavaOne Codegarten we already have some ideas to work on, of course we can (and we will!) decide on the spot if a new idea comes in, i.e, someone brings a cool feature/bug/testcase to the table. At the moment we're looking at fiddling around with Groovy, Arquillian, Spock, Geb, Ratpack, Gradle, JSR354, OpenJDK8.
So come in, join us at OTN Lounge by the Exhibition floor located at the Hilton, from 10:30am to 4:00pm Monday to Wednesday. Let's have some fun while coding. Let's make knew acquaintances and learn new tricks. Let's make the world a better place, one commit at a time.
