It's official. We're pleased to announce we are going to be co-hosting the Gopher Gala 2016.
For those who don't know what this is about, the Gopher Gala is a distributed hackathon where the main programming language to be used is Go. People form groups (one-man armies are also common) and work on an idea for a limited amount of time, submit their ideas and either some jury or the community votes for the best app and in the end a winner is elected.
Because of its distributed nature, hackers from all around the world can participate real time no matter where they are as long as they respect the official 48 hours time slot (23/01/2016 01:00 UTC - 25/01/2016 01:00 UTC).
There are even going to be prizes (yet to be announced on the 8th of January) but we know that the spirit of events of this sort is more about the gathering, the comradery and the nerd talk. Nevertheless, we think prizes are also a good incentive for some people ;)
Why?
We believe in the community. We like giving back to the community. This is one of the main reasons why we organised the Software Circus last summer (tickets had a price but we gave free entrance to everyone who considered themselves part of a minority group in the IT world), the Software Circus Winter Wonderland edition (talks can be found here) which was free for everbody, the Pre-DockerCon EU Innovation Day in Barcelona last year which was also free entrance (check the timelapse video here).
If you have been following our public activities closely, then you will surely know also about our contributions to the open source community. Things like the Elasticsearch Mesos Framework, minimesos (our testing infrastructure for Mesos frameworks), Cobbler's Terraform provider and many others are part of our contribution to the world in an effort to say thank you to all the developers and companies out there that in one way or the other make our lives easier and make Container Solutions the learning and open company it is today.
By hosting this event we want to empower the community yet again by putting smart people in a room and giving them the right tools to work on any ideas they might have. We don't really care what it is. This has worked well for us in the past giving birth to creative solutions for complex problems and we are sure it'll work the same for the peeps that will be joining us in our headquarters to participate in this hackathon.
Where?
In our HQ in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
We're right next to the Leidseplein. It's a very central place for everyone from around the city to meet.
The address is: Korte Leidsedwarsstraat 12.
On the map: https://goo.gl/maps/ynfX44qU2EB2
When?
Our office will open its doors for participants on 23/01/2016 09:00 CET. We'll close our doors when the last man standing leaves the door.
How?
By filling in this form. People interested in participating must be quick as our capacity is limited to 20 participants.
What's in for the hackers?
We're going to be providing the things that you would normally find in any other hackathon or lan party: pizza, beers, energy drinks and snacks.
Last but not least we want to wish the best of luck to all the participants and we truly hope that they all have lots of fun!
Happy hacking!