BetaPizza Hackaton Results

Friday a week ago a Beta Pizza Hackaton took place at the SUSE offices and online. 121 people went over more than 580 bugs, screening 440 and fixing 140 of them. The contest was won by Stephan ‘coolo’ Kulow and Dominique ‘DimStar’ Leuenberger, with top gold fixers Josef Reidinger and Michael Chang and a honorable mention for Antoine Saroufim.

The BetaPizza Party Concept Turned Hackaton

Usually, the BetaPizza is as much about testing as about party. This time we added in the fixing of bugs as well! The SUSE engineers joined on Friday the 27th to catch and kill as many of these pesky little creatures as possible.

We set up some facilities:

• a bug list prepared in bugzilla, labeled as GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE as part of a contest)

• a Google hangout

• a #openSUSE-pizza-hackaton IRC channel on Freenode

In the various offices, a local BetaPizzaMaster made sure a common room was reserved and pizza was available at the appropriate time.

Results and winners of the bug fixing contest

Let’s start our results section with some great statistics:

• ** 140** fixed (19 GOLD, 4 SILVER, 0 BRONZE, 117 OTHER)

• ** 440** screened (46 GOLD, 19 SILVER, 0 BRONZE, 375 OTHER)

• ** 121** participants (76 employees, 45 volunteer)

As we said in the initial article announcing the event, we have some SUSE provided prizes for top contributors. An evaluation committee was established with Richard Brown (openSUSE Board member), Frederic Crozat (SLE department, openSUSE contributor) and Michal Hrusecky (openSUSE Team) as members.

It was a tough decision, but in the end, the committee selected two hackers, well known to Factory contributors, as overall winners: Stephan ‘coolo’ Kulow and Dominique ‘DimStar’ Leuenberger. The committee furthermore awarded the top contributors working on the preselected golden bugs: Josef Reidinger and Michael Chang. The committee finally decided on a Honorable mention. This one goes to Antoine Saroufim, who was helping the GNOME team a lot with testing and providing feedback regarding various bugs and crashes over IRC.

So in the end, we have three awards with following winners:

• ** Winners:** Stephan ‘coolo’ Kulow and Dominique ‘DimStar’ Leuenberger

• ** Top gold fixers**: Josef Reidinger and Michael Chang

• ** Honorable mention:** Antoine Saroufim

Local experiences at the SUSE Offices

Taipei kicked off the long day, opening the hangout and working from a single room. Beijing had the biggest showing with 40 participants and 18 pizza’s eliminated though part of the Pizza eaters were kicking off hackweek and didn’t participate in the hackaton. The Pizza Master David Liang reports that the team enjoyed the IRC bot which reported the results of their work and other teams echo-ed this.

The Provo team noted that being in the last timezone meant being pretty lonely. Pizza Master Scott suggested we need to set up a teleportation unit and get everybody physically in one place next time. The openSUSE team is evaluating this option and suggestions for reasonably priced teleportation devices are welcome.

More testing?

All in all, we fixed lots of bugs, rid the world of some pizza (don’t worry, the world isn’t running out, and it’s easy to make) and had fun. But there’s more work to do - openSUSE 13.1 RC1 is out and we’re looking forward to more bug reports and fixes!