1st Yade hackathon

The first Yade Hackathon took place in Freiberg, Germany on June 23rd and 24th of 2022!

Eight developers were on site while one joined remotely during the presentation sessions. This tight knit group of Yade developers already meets bi-monthly via zoom, but the Yade Hackathon gave them the opportunity to meet offline to discuss issues in the software, prognose the future of the project, fix bugs, work on the code, and even tour the city together.

A former core developer, Vaclav Smilauer, made a special guest appearance during the first day where he even contributed some expert advice to the hackathon.

From left to right, Vasileios Angelidakis, Anton Gladky, Katia Boschi, Jerome Duriez, Robert Caulk, Bruno Chareyre, Janek Kozicki, Vaclav Smilauer (not pictured Klaus Theoni)

Main topics of discussion included:

• Install documentation update, e.g., split installation dependencies, depending on the required features. MR

• Drop the wiki page and moving the valuable information to the documentation or on the website. Issue

• Check the last publications, where the Yade was cited and put the links into the documentation. MR

• Add support of the Qt6, which is already available in Debian repositories Issue. Follow up actions are identified.

• Distribute the yade-dem.org domain permissions to increase the bus factor for the project.

• Fix the newly added gitlab runner nova1. Issue

• Present the latest work, based on Yade and newer features added in the source code recently.

• Drop google-analytics code from the website. Issue, MR.

• Create a Yade short-course section on the website and include all content associated with a recent short-course. MR

• Discuss a future paper in Computer Physics Communications.

• Explore technical and non-technical discussions.

In contrast to their traditional means of communication via week-long email and issue tracking exchanges, the Yade developers found that this offline Hackathon provided an opportunity to quickly discuss problems and solutions.

We want to thank everybody who made this event possible:

• TU Bergakademie Freiberg for a general support.

• Institute for Informatics of the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, and personally Christian Schubert, Birgit Steffen and Sebastian Zug.

• Institute for the processing machines and recycling system technick, TU Bergakademie Freiberg, and personally Dr.-Ing. Prof. Holger Lieberwirth

• Institute of dynamics and flow mechanics, TU Bergakademie Freiberg, and personally Dr.-Ing. Prof. Rüdiger Schwarze

• Haver Engineering GmbH, and personally Jan Lampke and Hagen Müller.

Improvement plans for the next Hackathon include:

• Block out more time for the hacking. Ideally - many more days and until the evening

• Locate a better meeting place for the international group (Frankfurt-Am-Main)