Hackergarten @ Gr8conf EU 2014

Once more Copenhagen became the grooviest city in the world by hosting Gr8Conf EU 2014 earlier this June. There are many reasons to attend this conference: the action packed talks, the opportunity to speak and mingle with Groovy project leads and developers, the custom brewed beers and ales, and of course the Hackergarten.

This is the 5th iteration of Hackergarten at Gr8conf EU, and boy it did not disappoint. The evening began with drinks and pizza kindly sponsored by Balsamiq (the people behind Balsamiq Mockups, thank you!). Next I asked who was new to the Hackergarten concept, only 4 people (out of 60!) joined us for the first time. Then we jumped to brainstorm ideas on a whiteboard (as usual) before breaking up in teams. Lazybones, Grails, C.R.a.S.H, GVM were among the popular projects.

Particularly I ended up working in the brand new gvm-gui project as it turned out to be a Griffon frontend for gvm-sdk.

At one point we were able to split the team in two: one half working on the GUI, the other working on the logic itself. this was thanks to Griffon's MVC design. We were sending pull requests back and forth without stepping into each other toes. Special mention goes to Colin for sending the most PRs in less than an hour

From time to time I'll get up my chair and walk around the place to ask attendees how they were doing. I also took some pictures of groovy geeks hacking with smiles on their faces (see here). Gr8conf attendees had the chance to rate the conference using an online form. I was very surprised and happy to read the first reply for the Hackergarten session that I had to tweet it

In summary, Hackergarten at Gr8conf is the most successful event the group has run so far; we look forward to next year's

Keep on Groovying!