Xen Hackathon 2016

This article is a small recap about our participation in the last Xen Hackathon, located at ARM Ltd. in Cambridge.

Hackathon: an event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming.

This is a very accurate description of what happened this week at Cambridge, inside ARM walls.

But more than just collaborative work, which was already very productive, it's also the occasion to know people you usually only met online, and create a real bond with them.

This is very important to speed up any project. And believe me, Xen community is really good at this!

XO perspective

On our side, we had a lot of questions related to XenServer and XAPI, for Xen Orchestra. Thanks to the precious help of Jon Ludlam and Andrew Cooper, we managed to have clear and precise answers to our issues. It will be quickly visible in the next releases of Xen Orchestra, like displaying the start time of a XenServer host, parsing of alert messages, understanding more VSS snapshots mechanism etc.

But we also reviewed some of our current features to be sure we are not doing "bad stuff" with XenServer/XAPI. Good news, everything is fine :)

Around the Hackathon

But the Hackathon is not only the place to think together: it's also a lot of fun! Cambridge is a really nice city. We made punting for example (as you can see beer is not the only way to hang together).

Patching while punting is something you won't see everyday.

A big thanks to Xen teams for their availability, and ARM for hosting the event!