Day 2 of the PRIDE/OLS Hackathon is done and over. We've been inducing small brain seizures in 10 people for the last 2 days with PowerPoint overdoses. The good news is that we have a good spread of cookies and tea and coffee. The bad news is that we still have more powerpoint.
On the plus side, this exercise has forced us to write tons of good documentation – which any decent programmer is loathe to do. This will also be a good preparation for the Thursday morning talk I have been volunteered to do in a month for the whole sequence database group. But I digress.
The hackathon has also been a good training ground to see what kind of mistakes/problems people will experience in the wild. We know how to run the programs – we should, we built them from the ground up. What takes us a little less than an hour to do from scratch is proving to take more than a day for the average user. Mostly, it's because everything works on our laptops. In the wild, we need to deal with older/newer versions of stuff we need, different languages, different operating systems, different ways of thinking of how stuff should work. It's proving enlightning. And frustrating. But that's a whole other story.
On a completely different train of thought, I think that we've actually beginning to be regulars at the pub. We had dinner with the course people there tonight (paid by the EBI). I wanted to bring back a chocolate tart for Katy (as she was feeling a bit down) so I asked for one to take away. The waitress went to place the order and came back a minute later saying that the chef wanted to decorate the plate (as they normally do when you eat it at the restaurant), if they did garnish it prettily, would I mind bringing the plate back tomorrow?
In a word… sa-weet!