 OK. Thank you everyone. We will kick off with the welcome talk. All good? Cool. So sorry for the delay. Thanks everyone for your patience. Hopefully everything should be resolved. Hopefully everyone can see okay now. But first of all welcome all of you. Thank you for coming along today. My name is Phil Ywls. I work at Secura. I'm a co-founder of NFCOR many years ago and it's an absolute delight to be here in the US with our first ever community event outside of Europe. So welcome and round of applause everyone. So I'm just going to go through a few slides now about the logistics of the next couple of days, next day and a half, how things will work and then Venkat who's from Microsoft. Microsoft are very kindly sponsoring this hackathon. It will say a few words. And then after that we will rearrange into different groups so we can all sit next to other people working on some of the things. And I'll get back to that. So a little bit of context. 57 people registered for this event. So 57 of you in this room which is a brilliant number. I'm really happy to see that. Hopefully a really nice number. It's enough people that there's a world buzz and lots of people to chat to and not totally overwhelming. This is the first event in a long time which we have not done an online component for so this is like in person only. But we are still live streaming the wrap up talks and everything so that the people in the wider community can kind of feel a bit involved and see what we get up to. And obviously we'll be using Slack a lot as we always do so do kind of chat on there and anyone's watching who's not in the room feel free to sort of jump in and get involved as well. But yeah 57 of you registered I think nearly everyone from the U.S. Eddie hands up if you've come from somewhere that's not the U.S. Ah okay are you all Canadians? Great and hands up if you've flown for more than two hours to get here. Hands up if you work in some form of academia or research institute. Maybe the most important one for the imposter syndrome for everyone in the room. Hands up if this is the first time you've been to a next floor or enough core event. So don't be worried about feeling new to this because as is basically the case for almost every event we run about three quarters of you have never been to an NFCOR event before. You're amongst friends. But there's still a third of us here who hopefully know how we normally do things and are around to help out. Obviously anyone wearing a staff t-shirt you can come and ask for help but also there's a lot of people in the room not wearing a staff t-shirt who are either kind of old hands in the community or know what's going on. So don't be afraid and chat away to people. A quick overview of the schedule. So we're kind of kicking off now with a welcome talk. And like I said, Bankat's going to chat in a minute. We've got lunch at one o'clock. We're going to try and squeeze in a group photo just before that. After lunch if we can be back here we have a short quiz. It's the same quiz as the one we did in Barcelona. So if you joined online and know all the answers, don't cheat. So that should be a bit of fun. We'll talk later about how that works but we'll use cahoot if anyone's used that before. Then we'll get back to it and then we'll have a kind of these daily summaries where basically the group leaders or a representative from each group will come up and just do a super fast overview of the kind of things that people have been doing during the day and keep everyone in sync. Then a bit of free time and we've got a social tonight which I'll mention in a minute. And then tomorrow again, breakfast, same as today. Hack, rack up, lunch and then we'll be in the summit. And if anyone who hasn't seen it at the summit will be next door. So all the same place. We have the hackathon event web page on the NFCOR website which is this URL noted down here. But if you just go to the NFCOR web page it's kind of listed at the top of the homepage. That's kind of the go-to place for all the information about the event if you haven't already checked that out. Okay, some logistics. Hopefully all of you have power strips actually on the tables. I think not under the tables. So hopefully you'll have power. Shout if it doesn't work. Don't suffer in silence. We can sort stuff out. Fire exit is the big red exit sign. And we'll congregate just outside the main exit which we're right next to. The main thing is just please don't kind of go home. Because we want to count everybody off. So if you've gone back to your hotel we'll think you're stuck in an inferno. Which is no good. The Wi-Fi I think hopefully everyone's mostly set up with this but there's a Wi-Fi network called Hilton Honours Meeting and the password is Patriots. When we finish a welcome talk I'll put this slide back up so you can see. I think also I put this in the Slack channel. So you can find it there. Coffee. At the moment it's just there but it will be served all through the whole event and if you kind of go down the hall past where the breakfast was it will be down there at the end and there will be coffee and juice and water. Bathrooms are just there if you haven't found them. So go out this door just kind of where Justin stood under the exit sign and it's on the other side of the corridor. Photos. Take lots of photos. Please. Put them on Slack. Put them on Twitter. Put them on LinkedIn. Put them wherever you like to put them. Use the hashtag next low summit so other people can find them. But just remember to ask people if you're taking a photo of them. They're okay with that. I think everybody in the room has ticked a box saying that they're okay with having photos taken of them as part of the registration. So it should be fine but it's nice courtesy. Also I think Geraldine is going to be giving a talk at the summit saying what we've done during the hackathon. Those talks are much more interesting if we have pictures to put in them. The more photos you could all take the better. Like I say, lunch is at 1pm. So just before that around 12.45 or so I'll come and wave and we're going to assemble just where you picked up your badges basically just outside there. We'll try and squeeze everybody in for a photo with our photographer here. So don't leave around that time. And then tonight we have the social. So the social is happening at the Cheeky Monkey Brewery. I don't know how many local people there are to Boston here but Google Maps tells me it's not too far away. And we're going to have dinner there and drinks. In the schedule there's a bit of free time between the end of the hackathon and the start of the social so that you can go back and drop bags and things if you want to. We'll be kicking around here so you're welcome to just stay here and go straight to the social as well if you prefer. It's up to you. But try not to be too late because we're going to be sitting down and having dinner so try and be there around six. It says here that it ends at 8.30. That's how long our booking lasts for but if you want to stay on in the pub then you can. But it's not up to us anymore. Okay the actual hackathon itself. One thing I didn't do. Some people here who haven't been to an NFCOR hackathon before put your hands up if this is the first time you've ever been to any hackathon of any kind. So there's quite a lot of people who have been to hackathons before and not NFCOR ones. We call this hackathon but it's pretty loose usage of the term. We don't have a competition. We don't have particularly fixed goals really. The community is very collaborative and open and everything is about sharing and not competing. So we feel strange having a hackathon where that would be the case. So our hackathon we structure around some groups but don't feel particularly constrained. Don't worry about picking one. You're free to move around between groups during the hackathon. Whatever makes sense to what you're working on at the moment and it's just to try and roughly structure people so that you're close to people who are doing similar things so that you can chat and collaborate. For this hackathon we have four main groups. We've got pipelines which is just kind of for anyone working on building a pipeline, upgrading a pipeline, fixing bugs and pipelines. We have modules and sub-workflows which is about building components of NFCOR pipelines. NF test which is all about this adoption of a new testing framework that we're using for next slow and NFCOR and so porting over existing testing that we have from PyTest into NF test, both for modules and also for pipelines. And then we have a new group this time called Ops which is going to be all to do with automation of the GitHub NFCOR organisation and Terraform and stuff like that. I don't really know what it's going to be about. Edmund can tell you if you're interested. And then we have kind of a Meta group which is just for today where Geraldine will have a table set up for beginners if you're feeling a bit lost, you've never used GitHub before, you're kind of feeling a bit overwhelmed about what you should be doing or where to start, you can kind of go and hang out there and get a bit of help just to get up and running. Okay, so how does that actually work? First most important thing is you all must be on Slack. Hopefully we've added you all and we've added you all to the Slack channels for the hackathon but if you're not there already please go and join the NFCOR Slack. The next low Slack we use for the summit, the NFCOR Slack we use for the hackathon, two different Slack organisations. And so kind of kick off by chatting with the people in your group seeing what everyone else is working with and then we have a project board on GitHub for this hackathon with many, many issues that we've collected from the community. So if you have an idea of what you want to work with, you've brought with you, absolutely do that, that's great. It doesn't really matter if it's NFCOR but just if you have an idea of what you want to build, go for it. If you don't, we have this project board where we've collected all the community issues and you can find things and basically find tasks that you think are interesting and you'd like to work on. If you find one, make sure you assign yourself to that issue and this basically sort of grabs it for you so that no one else starts working on it at the same time. Please only assign one at a time just while you're actively working on it. Then get to work, write some code, bash away at it, do whatever it is you're trying to do and when you're finished, push to your fork of that repository and open up at your pull request. We have a Google Slides deck for everybody where basically we'll have a summary and we'll use that Google Slides deck saying this is what we've worked on today. So when you've finished an issue or an item you can just make a note of that thing there to help your group representative summarise at the end of the day. Then celebrate, shout, do a little victory dance, write something in Slack, go and have a cup of coffee and start the whole cycle again. Something I haven't put here but it's very important is try and dedicate some time to reviewing other people's pull requests. Especially the early hackathons, what would happen is everyone would get really excited, open thousands of pull requests and then the hackathon would end and we'd just be left with this huge queue of reviews. So for every pull request you put in try to review at least one other pull request. It doesn't matter if you're new to the community you can review people's code even if it's just looking for typos. So please try and make sure you do some reviews. If you don't have an option to leave a little green tick it's because you're not part of the NFCOR GitHub organisation. To join please go into Slack and we have a Slack channel called GitHub Invitations. Post your GitHub username there and add you to the GitHub org. Any questions on this? Slack, we have a whole bunch of channels. We've got the main one which is where we'll put out any announcements and things like that. And then we have a different Slack channel for each of the working groups just because otherwise it gets too noisy. You're all in all of them. Feel free to mute or leave the channels that you're not involved with if it's too noisy which it probably will be. There's one for beginners and there's one for each group. Please don't leave the main one because we'll be telling you about updates. Bear in mind that we have a code of conduct for the community which both for online behaviour but also covers in-person events. So by being here you're implicitly accepting to abide by the code of conduct. It's nothing special. It's just kind of, you know, be nice. Don't try and ask before taking or always as an outdated screenshot screenshots or photos. And remember to take photos. Especially for those of you who are new to NextFlow and NFCOR we kind of emphasise that this is not a training event so we're kind of assuming that everyone has a rough idea already of how to use NextFlow and write code for NextFlow and NFCOR. If you're feeling completely lost remember that we do have a lot of online resources. We have lots of talks, something like 80, I think I said 86 it was in my last one, talks on the NFCOR website and the bite-size. These cover all kinds of things especially starting off as lots of beginner topics like creating your first pull request, packaging software on Bioconda, how linting works for automatic formatting. You know, all these different topics. They're really nice little snippets if you're feeling lost by something that you're unfamiliar with go and check out the bite-size talks. These are all on YouTube. Many of them have transcripts written underneath them as well. For more general stuff we have a training.NextFlow.io which is where we host all of our open courses for course material for running. If you're completely new to NextFlow itself this is where to go. Some people do this at hackathons. They basically use the time as carved out slots to run through training. That's fine of course there's lots of people around to ask for questions and help. There's loads of documentation on the NFCOR website. Something new is we have the community forum which is less of an NFCOR thing starting to be a NextFlow thing. Also check that out and go and post questions there especially about NextFlow. This is new only launched last month and my hope is it will start to grow as a community focal point. It covers all of the secure tools so there's secure platform, NextFlow, multi-QC because often these topics overlap. The nice thing about this versus Slack is it's publicly visible to anyone. Hopefully Google and things will find it in the future. Especially if this is new to you, go and check it out and see if you can find some good questions to pop in there. Social, we've got the main social tonight but we also have Bingo which is a tradition for NFCOR hackathons. If you go to the NFCOR events web page you'll find a link and you can load up a Bingo page and it will be a different board for each person when you load it and it has all different things which have happened at previous NFCOR hackathons or the little memes or tropes for the community. You can tick things off there and if you get Bingo, shout and post a screenshot on Slack and there will be a small prize at the end. So check that out for a bit of fun. Like I say later today, we've got a quiz. There you go. It's worth it. The man at the back, Chris, has got bags of stickers and there's some special shiny gold ones. They're very coveted. With that, I'd like to basically wrap up on my intro. Say again, huge thank you to all of you for being here. Thank you to Sikira for organising the event. Thank you to Microsoft for sponsoring the hackathon. Thank you to the Transakaberg initiative. We've had two grants that you've received at i. We've sponsored many of our work. Much of the work we've done. I'm trying to write a grant application again for anyone at the moment. But they've been really supportive of our community. Oh, yeah. Remember to go and have drinks. I was going to say drink coffee and stand up. If you like AI generated arts or anything, check out the AI cafe Slack channel for a bit of a laugh. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I was going to say a few words for Microsoft. Welcome everyone to Boston. It's actually great to be part of this in person. It's been since 2019, which is actually the start of NFCOR really. Came out of one of these meetings and these guys were getting coffee and they came up with these ideas. It's been a long time coming and it's great that Microsoft is getting to be part of the community. We've been driving a lot of initiatives within NFCOR and Sikira. We did a lot of stuff with code spaces and development and testing. This year we've also provided more credits so the NFCOR pipelines can be all tested seamlessly on Azure. Part of the hackathon will probably be us on the ops side setting all of that up and making sure it works seamlessly. In the last year, if you haven't seen, a lot of our stuff has been all on large language models and AI. One of the things that we're starting to do is build large language models for domain specific languages like NextFlow. One of the things that we would like to talk to the community about is how useful that is, how can we democratize bioinformatics tools for the community. We currently have co-pilot and that's kind of trained on the corpus of GitHub, but that has problems. We have code that's terrible. We have DSL1, code and syntax from a lot of different people. One of the things that we've been working on and we'll talk more about in my talk later this week is we've been retraining it on the NFCOR modules and how useful that is so that we could effectively have someone write in. I would like a process that uses Minimap2 and Alliance and sorts the data. Then can it come up with NFCOR syntax, all the decorators necessary, the condo environment setup as well as provide resources on exactly where it got it from in NFCOR. Could it either cite things that already exist so you don't have to recreate the module or can it cite where it grabbed it from the modules. One of the things that we would like to ask the community and I'll be around is what other things could be added to it. Testing with the new NF test framework, documentation, tools documentation. These are all things that we want to list at feedback and see how we can improve the model now and then how do we open source it in the future so that you can trade it on NFCOR but you could also add your own specific repositories and train it easily on board a lot of your people. Glad to be part of the community and I don't want to take up too much time so we can get into hacking. Thank you. Exciting stuff. I'm very curious to see what the next few days will be. It's been a lot of interest on AI models for the next flow and we haven't done very well at it so far I think it's fair to say so it would be awesome if we could build something really useful with that. Right, okay. Now is the time where you probably want to close your laptop and pick up your bag because we are going to now split up into the different groups. What I failed to do was put on the faces and names of all the different group leaders so I'm going to ask you to help me out here with everybody. First off, beginners is Geraldine over there. Geraldine, you will pick a table I guess when everyone stood up. Okay, so beginners table is back in the middle there so if you're in that group go over there. Pipelines is Maxime. Is there anyone else who's group leader from Pipelines? Okay, it's Maxime. Pipelines table here. Pipelines tables there. Modules and sub-workflows Gisela. Modules and sub-workflows over there with Gisela. Infrastructure, this slide is outdated it's not infrastructure it's NF test. Satish, was that NF test? Where do you want to be Satish? Pick a table. Over there NF test back corner next to the orange juice and then Ops is Edmunds. Where do you want to go Edmund? Funt middle? Funt middle for Ops and I'll put up a proper slide with the groups. Okay, cool. Thank you very much everybody.