[Act-dev] Act hackathon post-mortem

[Philippe Bruhat (BooK)]

Hi,

It's now been two and half weeks since the hackathon in Lyon ended.

While we initally hoped to spend four days hacking on improving Act, we
instead had a lot of discussions/arguments about what our roadmap was,
which technology to use, and how to bring in new contributors. Some
might think we're thin on the results in lines of code, but in fact
Sébastien has been closing bugs in the current/legacy Act, Salve has
worked on improving Act-out-of-the-box, and Clément has offered patches
to implement OAUTH, just to name a few. I even got to re-familiarize
myself with the code and contributed some patches after the hackathon.

And we got four days of talking and arguing and doodling and braindumping,
which is something that is best done with everyone in the same room,
and is a good reason to have a hackathon in the first place. Thank you
all for coming, for offering your work and sharing your ideas.

All in all, I we had a great hackathon. And we are ready to move forward.


The idea for this hackathon came up a few months ago, when I met Theo
in Amsterdam. At the time, I told him I would help with Act1 and try not
to derail the project with my vision for Act2. I turns out I didn't really
keep my promise during the hackathon... and I'm really sorry about it.

I also learnt two important things:
1. we have a core of motivated people willing to improve the existing,
2. the technology is available for me to pursue my vision and turn it
   into running code.

Act Voyager is a community-sponsored project that promised to deliver
something back to the community. Act2 (or whatever it's going to be
called) on the other hand, is my personal vision of the evolution of
Act. These two projects have different goals and different timelines,
and it won't be possible for a single team to work on both. We've already
witnessed how distracting it can be.

Therefore:
- Act-Voyager will reuse proposed ideas from the hackathon and continue
  its travel through the galaxy
- I'll continue to support the Act-Voyager team while I'm working on my
  ideas for Act2, and look for volunteers to help me when I have some
  actual code to show (i.e. keep my promise, this time)
- Theo will soon publish more info about Act-Voyager on the TPF blog
- we'll meet again in Oslo in May (there's some money left on the Act fund)

Thanks again for coming to Lyon,


-- 
 Philippe Bruhat (BooK)

 Few things in life are so dependable as the incompetence of those who know
 precisely what they are doing.   (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #5 (Pacific))