 Hello and welcome to the NFCOR Hackathon online and distributed in March 2024. My name is Philiuels, I'm Product Manager for Open Source Software at Sikira and it's my pleasure to welcome you all today and give you a quick overview of how the Hackathon works, what to expect from the next few days. Firstly, it's amazing to see so many of you here today. Signed up this year we have 466 people, which is phenomenal. It's a record. Again, it's the biggest hackathon we've ever hosted, I think, and it's just brilliant that so many people are excited to turn up and work together. They're really excited to see what we can achieve. This year we have distributed sites, so we have 23 of you have volunteered to host local sites all around the world and the majority of people joining the hackathon are joining in person at one of those local sites. So, 321 people at local sites and 145 of you are joining online. So, welcome everybody. I said it's a record, it's just brilliant looking at the online hackathons that we've had over the last three years and seeing these numbers kind of climb year on year, both in the number of attendees and the number of sites. So, a great trend to see continuing and let's see how long we can keep this up. We asked a few questions when you signed up just to kind of get a feel for the types of people attending and just like as we have with basically every event we hold, the majority of you have never been to an NFC hackathon. So, if you're sat there not quite sure what's going to happen or don't worry you're kind of amongst friends, the majority of people at the event are also new to it. So, of course, 159 of you have come back for more. Great to have you here. But the 307 of you have never been to an NFC or an NFC hackathon before. I hope you enjoy this one and I hope you'll be in the light blue segment of the next time. Looking at the different local sites on the way around the world, the first thing that strikes me is that there's lots of them this year. Thanks again for everyone volunteering, it's amazing to see. And quite a range in how big the different sites are. Some of you will be a group of people kind of in a meeting room, I imagine, and some are quite big sites. This year around Heidelberg in Germany is the winner that most people attending. A phenomenal turnout there, so welcome all of you. And of course, the biggest site is online. Those local sites have got a pretty good geographical spread, lots to view in Europe. It's good to see a few more sites popping up across America and also in South America as well and Canada. So thank you all for joining. Really good. If we look at who's joining, including the attendees, we asked you where you live. You can see we've got an even better geographical spread. So special kind of notes to those of you joining from India and further afield. I hope you don't have to stay up too late. Right, so let's go on to kind of the mechanics of how we're going to do this. Because we're running primarily online, we're going to use this platform called Gather, which you can get to at www.gather.down. Gather Town is basically kind of a bit like a computer game if you like. If you've ever kind of played Pokemon, if you're old enough like me, or anything like this, it's kind of like you have a little avatar, a little character you can walk around and explore and chat to people. You can find the right keyboard shortcut you can dance. And there's a dedicated bite size talk all about Gather Town. We've been using this platform for a few years. So if you're feeling lost or just curious, go and look up that link and James explains all about Gather, how to use it and various troubleshooting and tips. The map this year is built based on previous years, but kind of extended. A lot of work on in here by Chris. They're looking pretty fantastic with the sticker logo up there and various different kind of regions that you can explore. You can see along the top there's kind of different doorways you can go through there for different groups and their main lecture hall and various other stuff. So it's just like being in a kind of real life conference venue really. You can get outside that stuffy hall if you want to go for an explore. There's a nice beach to go and have a rest and relax if you'd like. And who knows what other regions you might find if you explore enough. I genuinely don't know. There's a bunch of things you'll find as you walk around Gather Town which will glow yellow when you go close and you'll see a little pop-up. Look out for these. They do different things. Some of them will load up relevant web pages with more information or kind of things like that. Some of them will whiteboards which load up collaborative whiteboards where people you're working with you can jump in and scubble. So various different kind of elements around Gather Town. Look out for that. One of the things that's quite difficult sometimes with many of us in Gather Town at once is finding other people. So just remember on the right hand side you've got a toolbar. You can click that to bring up or a list of everyone there. Type in someone's name, click on them and then you have a few options and the one that I personally use the most is a button that says follow and that will just get your little person just to walk around the map and go and find that person so you don't have to spend ages feeling lost looking for the person you're trying to talk to. And final thing, when you're walking around you'll sometimes see the screen kind of change like this where everything grays out apart from the section that you're stood in and it pops up saying you've entered a private area. What these rooms are, they're kind of like breakout rooms on Zoom where you can hear everybody in that space and everybody can hear you but it cuts off all the chatter from people outside that private space so it's good for small groups to go and kind of meet and chat without distraction. There are lots of these spaces all around so as you walk around you'll see them and many of them are kind of dedicated rooms. So to get into the Gather Town space please remember to use the email that used to sign up for the hackathon. It's done by email list so check your inbox if you're not sure what that is. And try and stay online on Gather Town platform even those of you who are at local events. Sometimes it can be tempting to kind of just forget about it because there's lots going on around you in person but remember we're collaborating across different teams and Gather Town is really the key place where that happens so please try and keep your, stay logged in and keep an eye on that in the background. Also if you're having meetings or chatting to people online remember to use your headphones if you're in an in person location otherwise they can get noisy so just try and be respectful for the people you're sat next to. Okay what else are we doing? Slack as always with NFCore and NextFlow so if you haven't yet joined the NFCore Slack go and find this link NFCore website and press the big green button to join. There's a button you can click on which just takes you straight into our Slack organization and this is where all the kind of text-based conversation will happen basically. Once you're into the Slack space if you search for channels the channels are where you can break up the conversation into different spaces within Slack you'll find one dedicated for this event called Hackathon March 2024. That's not all because there's so many of us we break up into smaller channels dedicated on specific topics so it's not too noisy and so you'll find a whole bunch of them with the same prefix and there you are named after the different kind of project groups we're working in so you can all chat together there in Slack as well as a handful of other ones which are to do as social events and various other things. You'll also find going on to the groups that we're working in each of these group leaders has prepared a video explaining roughly what the topics will be about that particular group how it will work and giving kind of an introduction to it. At the time of recording this isn't online yet so I've got a screenshot from 2023 but it looks exactly the same so it's a playlist on the NFCOR YouTube channel. Also when you go to the NFCOR website with the event page you'll find all the different groups listed there with the topics and you should hopefully find these introduction videos embedded there so they should be easy to find. When you signed up you will have picked the groups you're interested in working with but don't worry if you can't remember don't worry if you've changed your mind it's very flexible you can just come and go into different groups many people spend the three days mixed across multiple groups and that's totally fine. It's just to give you an idea of roughly where to go and the kinds of things to work on and kind of make it easy to find people who are working on similar topics. So I said you had to sign up and say which groups you're interested in this gives you an idea of how popular the different groups are as usual Pipelines is the most popular group that's basically always the case and of course where we come to collaborate on Pipelines and lots of you want to do exactly that. And there's also lots of people interested in joining in with their modules, sub-workflows, NF tests and training materials and infrastructure. A handful of you put things into other textbooks of other things you wanted to work on and my favorite was the person who said they wanted to work on croissants so yeah good enjoy that. Bonus points. Okay you've decided what you're going to work on you found your group everything's great what do you do now? First up you pick your group and you watch the introduction video so usually you can watch it at your leisure. Hop into Slack find the relevant Slack channel for your group and say hello say who you are where you've come from what your experiences what your expectations are get chatting and see who else is around. Next up you find a task that you want to work on means either tasks you already know about you've kind of bought your own you know what you want to work on that's fine or you go to the GitHub project board for the hackathon which I'll show in a minute and find something that sounds interesting. If you are bringing your own work please make sure you create an issue if there isn't one already on GitHub and add it to the project board and this way we track all of the work that's been done through the hackathon and get a feel for what people are working on. Once you've found an issue sign yourself on GitHub so that basically puts your face on that issue and means that other people don't also pick the same issue and you do the same thing at the same time and end up duplicating someone else's work. It's fine to add more than one person to a single issue as long as you both know about it then that just makes your work visible. And then get on with it start writing some code enjoy yourself ask other people for help and when you're finished make a pull request so push your code to your fork of your NFCore GitHub repo and then open up a pull request to merge those changes back upstream. Remember pull requests are the best when they are relatively small and well described so try not to make some kind of bare mouth which is going to be impossible to review keep them nice and neat and kind of itemized. And then over time we're going to have wrap up meetings at the end of each day and we're going to basically do a quick report of just the kinds of things that people have been working on. So remember it together with the rest of your team just keep a note of the kinds of things you're working on on those Google slides so the group leader doesn't have to panic at the end of the day with an empty slide which is almost guaranteed to happen. It always happens. Okay. GitHub project board. What do I mean? If you go to NFCore GitHub pages and click projects at the top you'll hopefully find one called Hackathon March 2024. This is a slightly overwhelming page because there's many tabs along the top and many issues. The first one is overview which has got loads of stuff and then these tabs are also broken up by team you can see there. Some of them are special so there was ones like saying my issues which filters just for the ones where you've assigned it to yourself. Ready to review poor request you've reviewed and good first issue are ones where we've labeled ones which are good for beginners. So this is where we track and label all of the work that's going on in terms of the duration of a hackathon and there's a tab that you should basically have open in the background the whole time. When you put in that poor request you're not done. Creating the poor request is kind of step one and then getting that poor request merged is step two. There's two parts for this. There's firstly getting someone to review your code and then there's usually some back and forth where they might suggest changes or you discuss something and before finally getting it merged but also of course this is a two-way situation so other people need you to review their code. Even if you're a beginner doesn't matter. Everyone should be reviewing poor requests. It's a big part of getting into the community and if you are a beginner it's a great way to learn best practices and see how other people write code. If you are a beginner and you're nervous don't worry you don't have to merge anything and it doesn't matter if multiple people review poor request that's a good thing. So just jump in and do as much as you can What can happen at Hackathons we have loads of people pushing work and if we don't get enough reviewing we end up with a huge backlog of poor requests which don't get merged which is kind of a bit sad and have lots of people doing puppy eyes or kitten eyes saying please can you review poor request and if you really towards the end of a Hackathon there will be many memes I imagine so you need to sort of get in there review review review should do as much reviewing as you do submitting a poor request at least. The best way to do this in our experience is to kind of find a review buddy and so find someone else maybe who's sat at your table or is working in your team or something and you can kind of swap reviews with each other as you go with poor requests and this way you kind of while you're waiting for someone else to review your poor request you can be reviewing theirs and it keeps everything moving fluidly. There's also a special Slack channel called Request Review which is not a Hackathon thing, it's there all the time so if you're kind of waiting and no one's picked it up you can pop a link to your poor request into that channel and people can jump in and help out. Okay, if you're kind of especially relatively new to next phone NFCOR and looking for some extra resources check out the Bite Size page on the NFCOR website. We have weekly short talks there they're typically 15 minutes long about all kinds of different topics some of them about pipelines and stuff but there are many talks there aimed sort of as training resources which go through all kinds of topics related to working with Nexplo and NFCOR so have a look there, there's loads of good resources and most of them have tramscripts so you don't even have to watch a video if you don't want to you can kind of skip through the text. There's also the YouTube channel where all of these Bite Size talks are hosted but there's also many more videos on there on the YouTube channel for NFCOR and then there's Nexplo training material itself where if you just like to spend three days basically working on the training material and getting yourself up to speed with Nexplo that's absolutely a valid way to spend your time and just generally the NFCOR website has got tons of documentation and resources Of course hackathon isn't all work, we've got a few kind of social activities lined up for you those of you who've been to the NFCOR hackathons before will be familiar with them we've got a scavenger hunt for photos, we've got a regular bingo running Findersocks, Kahoot, Chris and Pizza so a scavenger hunt there's a special Slack channel hackathon march 2024 scavenger hunt and basically there will be a bunch of kind of challenges posted there saying take a photo of this thing it might be a nice view out of your window or some kind of other challenge so keep an eye out on those and each time there's a challenge there's a kind of thread under that Slack message to post photos and response no limit just go crazy do as many as you can it's really fun and it's a great way with all the different distributed sites especially online people all over the world kind of seeing where people are working in different kind of situations so it's really fun more than area we will share the highlights and the daily syncs and if there's any particularly good ones we have our regular NFCore bingo cards running of course you can find the link to this through the event page which is basically a whole bunch of kind of silly things and some jokes about things like GitHub always goes down during the hackathon so if that happens you can see if you can find it on your bingo card and give a shout if you get bingo in Galatown we have the NFCore Socks emoji now Chris Hackart has hidden five pairs of NFCore Socks all around and gather before you ask we're not going to give you any clues he's a hard man and when you find a pair of Socks take a screenshot so that we've proven you found it keep track of them and when you've got all of them send those photos to Chris and the fastest wins basically there will be prizes for winners now it's pretty addictive the sock hunt searching I'm very well hidden you can see this one from a couple of years ago where Matthias has found a sock just poking out from underneath a tree so it's not going to be made easy for you but yeah maybe don't spend your entire three days just looking for socks I won't blame you if you do on Tuesday we have Chris on the platform called Kahoot basically it's multiple choice questions this is Chris has been done by our resident master Matthias there might be some mega-no-ones such as those tricky mark down questions that always get me but it's always a lot of fun so join in if you can this is our only kind of synchronous social event which will be happening at 3pm European time and hopefully it works for most time zones and that will be in Galatown in the lecture theatre this one's not going to be live streamed on YouTube or anything and then finally if you're at local sites there will hopefully be pizza or something like it and this is kind of totally up to each local site so it will be different depending on where you are so if in doubt talk to your local site coordinator and site coordinators please talk to Chris Hackert and be nice to him he's got much more sort of professional looking photos on the web but when I found this one I couldn't resist ready to launch so Chris is going to be sat there approving all of your kind of virtual credit cards and I think it will be slightly traumatised by it so please be nice to him right we're nearly there code of contact by being here and signing up you agreed to abide by it so please just take 30 seconds to check over it it's on the NFCOR website it's pretty simple just remember especially for the hackathon to ask consent from people when taking screenshots or photos of people and sort of just be nice and remember to take breaks and remember also you got an email with a checklist of all the different things you need to do to kind of get set up for the hackathon now I'm sure all of you are great at reading your emails and you've already gone through this checklist but just in case there's anyone maybe it went into a spam folder well whip through them super fast so check the code of conduct I'm sure you've done that one I've been talking register on the NFCOR Slack if you haven't already and found find those hackathon Slack channels register on github if you've never registered on github before and join the NFCOR github organization you can do that by going to a Slack channel called github invitations wave your hand there pull up your Slack username and someone will add you to the NFCOR github org that gives you right access to all the repos so you can push code and open pull request and merge other people's pull requests also means you can be assigned to issues and everything so it's a really key part of working in the hackathon if you find that you can't be assigned to things you can't review other people's pull requests it's probably because you're not a member of the NFCOR organization yet on github register on gather join the hackathon space and then get set up locally so get nextflow and NFCOR installed and some kind of way of provisioning software or if you prefer join on github which is kind of virtual online coding spaces when set up an environment there there's preconfigured NFCOR spaces you can use on github so post on Slack if in doubt and of course check on the NFCOR website to make sure you know where to find all the docs and the training and everything else quick note on training because there probably will be some of you who are kind of beginners and interested in doing the training we have three courses now we've got fundamentals which is great for beginners there's now advanced training as well run by Rob Simon-Sikira which has got some really kind of more detailed topics and a shorter course called applied training which is great as a refresher it's kind of hands-on you're just writing code straight away rather than going through lots of theory we ran the foundational training just a few days ago and so those videos are up on YouTube and embedded into the training website so it should be easy to find and the URL is training.nextflow.io next up a couple of things that are coming up soon just while I've got everyone's attention so in 2024 we'll have two Nextflow Summit events just like last year but they'll be a bit better spaced out so the first one will be in Boston in the US and that's coming out pretty soon in May so tickets are open right now so please do go and register and actually I think the deadline for submitting an abstract has just been pushed out slightly longer so it's still time to get a talk in it'd be great to see as many people there as possible and then there'll be the Barcelona event in October, end of October both of these events have associated hackathons so these are the next NFCOR hackathons after this one you can find out all the information about the events and where to register and everything else at summit.nextflow.io also out just a few days ago was the kind of Nextflow survey that we do every year annual survey which we call the state of the workflow we've been doing a bunch of years now it's kind of consistent questions roughly year to year so we can kind of track changes in what people are interested in and how they're working and if you need any encouragement there's a prize draw as well so you can win a MacBook and then I think 10 people will be getting a Nextflow kind of goodie bag with all brand new swag with a new nice rebranded Sakura and Nextflow logos on it so definitely worth filling out for that I'm actually quite jealous I haven't got all that myself yet and there's a typeform link there secure.typeform.com don't worry if you kind of don't get this in time it's also posted on the NFCOR Slack channel so it should be easy to find right final but a little bit I just wanted to kind of point to a few of the ways that we get news and updates out about Nextflow and NFCOR especially for those of you who may be a bit newer to the community also to draw attention to the fact that we now have a blog on the NFCOR website which is pretty new so the NFCOR blog we use for anything NFCOR specific so we've got some articles there about new releases of NFCOR tools highlighting changes especially focusing on anything that impacts pipeline developers there's also the Nextflow blog on the Nextflow website with lots of really nice articles there are some quite detailed technical things some more based around community and then Sakura has a blog as well which includes Nextflow things but also across to other portfolio of Sakura products and open source tools for example I'm going to plug my own multi-QC place that I put there the other day so across those three there's plenty of good reading and if you're not a fan of reading you can catch a bunch of stuff there on video or audio so I mentioned already we have the weekly bite size talks on NFCOR which are just nice short 15 minutes talks across all kinds of topics and we also have the channels podcast which is a longer more kind of in-depth thing it goes out every couple of weeks and that's about everything Nextflow so we've got some really kind of technical deep dios on how Nextflow language works from the developers of Nextflow we also have on kind of users of Nextflow using it in different ways and some community talks and all kinds of stuff there so that's across YouTube but also on Spotify and Apple podcasts and all the rest of it right I've been talking long enough so I'd like to say a huge thank you to all of our sponsors AWS and Microsoft for continuing to give us cloud credits to run all of our big tests on so thank you for that and big shout out to Sakira for financially supporting the event it would be it makes a huge difference so thank you all of our sponsors also a big thanks to everyone who's been involved in organizing the event as always I've listed just to get faces of a core team here who put in a phenomenal amount of work to keep everything running for NFCOR but also a big shout to the outreach team to the maintenance team and really all of you you know who you are and in making this event happen as well as just keeping NFCOR running it really is a fantastic community to be part of so thank you right with that I'll let you get on local site leaders if you guys want to talk about anything specific to your site otherwise jump in, watch intro videos for your talks get started and have a fantastic heck of them thanks so much