Organizing Hackathons

If you're organizing a hackathon, you may want to go through this page for tips on preparation

Basic do's and don'ts

• Don't rely on stable WiFi. Bring a router, and get to know the Internet infrastructure beforehand from the venue
• Do check the intended status of essential services like Bugzilla or mxr beforehand. You don't want them to go down during the event.
• If venue connection speed is problematic, present good alternatives to tools like MXR/DXR such as "ack", "grep", and "find".

For bug-squashing events

• Bring as many flash drives as possible with a mozilla-central clone (or whichever repo you intend to work with). Make sure each one work beforehand; some filesystems will silently discard important details like executable permissions while copying, causing mysterious build failures later.
• Don't assume that everyone has Linux. Prepare for Windows users by having a local copy of all the dependencies, such as mozilla-build, Windows SDKs, etc. Note that some of the required installers are network-based; installing Visual Studio 2010 Express over a shared wifi connection is probably not a viable option.
• Try to identify some easy, open bugs beforehand. Have plans for how to solve them, files to look at, etc., so you can quickly and effectively coach attendees.
• The first build is long. You might want to plan things accordingly, maybe having users set up a build before the bug-hunting starts.
• Consider having attendees choose tasks/start investigating solutions while waiting for build environment setup. You can still use tools like MXR/DXR while the code is being copied, for example.
• Consider pairing up attendees if one person's build environment will take significantly longer to set up than the other.
• When possible, consider providing access to machines that are already configured and pre-built. This can alleviate the problems with Windows-using attendees.