Right after JavaOne, I traveled to Tokyo, and attended a 3-day hack camp. The Jenkins community had done several 1-day hackathon around the world, but this is the first that spanned across multiple days.
14 people came to a small traditional hotel in this small sea-side city of Ito, a 90 minutes train ride away from Tokyo city center, complete with a spa. Japanese people have a special place in their hearts for a spa, so we had to have one!
We stayed there for close to 48 hours, and the hacking was literally around the clock! I was still somewhat jet-lagged, so I went to sleep earlier, but when I woke up next morning around 6am, some people were still hacking code!
In between the hacking, we ate, drunk, talked, and took a bath. Some of us played board games and some free bingo games that one of us brought (there seems to be a non-trivial intersection between the board game fans and open-source hackers.) There were a wide variety of activities, ranging from Arduino hardware hacking for XFD to automatic slave registration based on Android devices connected to USB, a bunch of automatic tool installers to classloader enhancements. Those results should be made online once people recovered from the trip.
One lesson for me for the next occasion is to plan for more ice-breaker events (which involves more drinking!) Maybe asking everyone to do a 5-10 minutes mini-talk about what they do and who they are.
