2016 Bug BBQ Summary

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At the beginning of the summer, the Software Carpentry community joined forces hold their first ever Bug BBQ. The goal of this event was to squash as many bugs in our core lessons as possible before we published and shipped the new version (2016.06) of the lessons. In addition to the goal of getting a large amount of work done as quickly as possible, we also aimed to use this event to engage and connect with our world-wide community.

In anticipation of the event, we worked with the lesson maintainers to identify and create specific milestones (issues and pull requests) that needed to be resolved before we could publish the new lesson versions. On the day of the event, our community worked hard to address these milestones, as well as to proofread and bugtest the lessons. The Software Carpentry community embraced the Bug BBQ event. We had 7 local sites spread across North America and Europe, as well as many many people participating remotely across the globe. On the day of the Bug BBQ alone, we observed a tremendous increase in the number of submitted, merged and rejected pull requests per day compared to the previous month. Analysis courtesy of Bill Mills.

The new version (2016.06) of the lessons have now been published, and details about who contributed, and citations can be found here. We would like to thank all who contributed to the new versions of the lessons, including those who participated before, during, and after the Bug BBQ. Our materials are far from perfect, but we’re very proud of what our community has built.

The Bug BBQ was organized by the Software Carpentry Mentoring Sub-Committee. The committee welcomes feedback and ideas for future Bug BBQs and other community events. To get in touch with us, please email us at mentoring@lists.software-carpentry.org.