[tor-talk] Gnu30 hackathon report

[Nick Mathewson]

Hi, all!

The Tor hackathon at the gnu30 event went fairly well, I think. Two
people sent me small built/test patches which I've merged into the Tor
mainline, and a few more have promised me test improvements and other
patches.  I also met a lot of cool hackers, and talked with people
from other free software projects.  About a half dozen people
approached me asking how to get Tor people to speak for conferences
and student groups; I told them about the appropriate mailing lists. I
pair-programmed a bunch of ed25519 code, and talked about cryptography
with a lot of people.  I hope we'll be seeing more of some of the
folks I talked to on our mailing lists and IRC channels soon.

One thing I really enjoyed was participating in other group's
hackathons. I reported a a few possible security holes in a couple of
projects, asked questions about how to get code merged into others,
and hassled people who weren't signing their packages.

I think for the next hackathon we organize ourselves, we should invite
some other non-Tor free software project; cross-pollinating ideas and
areas of expertise was pretty valuable.

If I remember correctly, somebody said that the FSF is new to hosting
hackathon-style events.  But I have a pretty hard time believing that,
given how smoothly everything went.

best wishes,
-- 
Nick Mathewson