This year again, the FPA organized a FreeCAD day and a hackathon (and much more !) together with FOSDEM , in Brussels. We had an incredible, epic week of events (which you’ll know all about later on this blog). I’ll describe here briefly what happened during the hackathon and the FreeCAD day.
The hackathon
The hackathon took place during 3 days at the Brussels hackerspace which traditionally offers the space to projects during the week before FOSDEM (and also organizes a kick-ass party during FOSDEM, which many FreeCADers less old and asocial than me attended ;) ).
Visiting the Brussels hackerspace is in itself a near-video-game experience, involving finding your way in a derelict building with long, similar corridors everywhere, codes on doors and dangerous missions, like helping the hackerspace people to carry dozens of crates of Club Mate through pitch-black basement mazes, failing lifts, and rooms protected by smoke machines. Luckily no zombie horde came.
After a cold start (literally, as we had a hard time kick-starting the wood stove) the first day, more and more people began to arrive, many coming there directly from their train/plane. Soon we reached our full capacity (about 20 people). The hackathon is a wonderful time to look at what everybody else is doing, finally stopping to discuss that particular idea with that specific person, chat with people you only knew online, launch wild ideas and immediately find interested people to work on it with you.
Some FreeCAD heroes like @chennes , @adrianinsaval or @paddle even managed to actually code and get an impressive amount of work done ;)
All in all, we had a lot of fun and, above all, there was there a team who shares a same passion for FreeCAD making it happen together. For me, this is also a kind of guarantee that what happens online, which can sometimes be unclear or veiled, is true and alive. We all share a similar vision over the project, we all want it to become better, more powerful, more universal.
The FreeCAD day
The FreeCAD day is a day open to everyone, where people can come, present an idea or a project they’re working on, discuss ideas or simply watch what’s being presented. This year, we shared the space with KiCAD who also maintained a room on their own. We also had a common space for people from both projects to meet and interact (many people are in fact members of both communities).
Around 30 people attended. The day unrolled smooth and nicely following the unconference idea: You want to talk about something? You write it on a post-it note, and place it somewhere on the schedule. Notes then get rearranged as the day unfolds.
Some of these took 5 minutes, other could last as long as 2 hours, like the complaints session, which was certainly the epic moment of the day. Kliment from KiCAD organized it masterfully like last year (say your complaint in one single sentence, no comments or discussions allowed), and we gained a wealth of good ideas, some easy to implement, some complex, some new, some well-known, but this was in any case a tremendously interesting and useful connection moment with FreeCAD users (sometimes ourselves, as many developers put their user hats and also started “complaining” ;) ). All in all, I felt we were all on the same page there: FreeCAD is awesome, but there is no reason why it can’t become more awesome!
Several other (often well-known) FreeCAD community members presented the projects they’re working on, and that also is an incredible opportunity to see some of the interesting things FreeCAD is used for.
Thanks to all of you who came and participated. This day was an incredible and unique convergence around FreeCAD, and I believe each of us came out of it full of ideas and renewed enthusiasm.
See you next year?