PRESS START

The dust has settled from the Subsurface Hackathon 2016 in Vienna, which coincided with EAGE's 78th Conference and Exhibition (some highlights). This post builds on last week's quick summary with more detailed descriptions of the teams and what they worked on. If you want to contact any of the teams, you should be able to track them down via the links to Twitter and/or GitHub.

A word before I launch into the projects. None of the participants had built a game before. Many were relatively new to programming — completely new in one or two cases. Most of the teams were made up of people who had never worked together on a project before; indeed, several team mates had never met before. So get ready to be impressed, maybe even amazed, at what members of our professional community can do in 2 days with only mild provocation and a few snacks.

Traptris

An 8-bit-style video game, complete with music, combining Tetris with basin modeling.

Team: Chris Hamer, Emma Blott, Natt Turner (all MSc students at the University of Leeds), Jesper Dramsch (PhD student, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen). GitHub repo.

Tech: Python, with PyGame.

Details: The game is just like Tetris, except that the blocks have lithologies: source, reservoir, and seal. As you complete a row, it disappears, as usual. But in this game, the row reappears on a geological cross-section beside the main game. By completing further rows with just-right combinations of lithologies, you build an earth model. When it's deep enough, and if you've placed sources rocks in the model, the kitchen starts to produce hydrocarbons. These migrate if they can, and are eventually trapped — if you've managed to build a trap, that is. The team impressed the judges with their solid gamplay and boisterous team spirit. Just installing PyGame and building some working code was an impressive feat for the least experienced team of the hackathon.

Prize: We rewarded this rambunctious team for their creative idea, which it's hard to imagine any other set of human beings coming up with. They won Samsung Gear VR headsets, so I'm looking forward to the AR version of the game.

Flappy Trace

A ridiculously addictive seismic interpretation game. "So seismic, much geology".

Team: Håvard Bjerke (Roxar, Oslo), Dario Bendeck (MSc student, Leeds), and Lukas Mosser (PhD student, Imperial College London).

Tech: Python, with PyGame. GitHub repo.

Details: You start with a trace on the left of the screen. More traces arrive, slowly at first, from the right. The controls move the approaching trace up and down, and the pick point is set as it moves across the current trace and off the screen. Gradually, an interpretation is built up. It's like trying to fly along a seismic horizon, one trace at a time. The catch is that the better you get, the faster it goes. All the while, encouragements and admonishments flash up, with images of the doge meme. Just watching someone else play is weirdly mesmerizing.

Prize: The judges wanted to recognize this team for creating such a dynamic, addictive game with real personality. They won DIY Gamer kits and an awesome book on programming Minecraft with Python.

Guess What!

Human seismic inversion. The player must guess the geology that produces a given trace.

Team: Henrique Bueno dos Santos, Carlos Andre (both UNICAMP, Sao Paolo), and Steve Purves (Euclidity, Spain)

Tech: Python web application, on Flask. It even used Agile's nascent geo-plotting library, g3.js, which I am pretty excited about. GitHub repo. You can even play the game online!

Details: This project was on a list of ideas we crowdsourced from the Software Underground Slack, and I really hoped someone would give it a try. The team consisted of a postdoc, a PhD student, and a professional developer, so it's no surprise that they managed a nice implementation. The player is presented with a synthetic seismic trace and must place reflection coefficients that will, she hopes, forward model to match the trace. She may see how she's progressing only a limited number of times before submitting her final answer, which receives a score. There are so many ways to control the game play here, I think there's a lot of scope for this one.

Prize: This team impressed everyone with the far-reaching implications of the game — and the rich possibilities for the future. They were rewarded with SparkFun Digital Sandboxes and a copy of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

DiamondChaser

aka DiamonChaser (sic). A time- and budget-constrained drilling simulator aimed at younger players.

Team: Paul Gabriel, Björn Wieczoreck, Daniel Buse, Georg Semmler, and Jan Gietzel (all at GiGa infosystems, Freiberg)

Tech: TypeScript, which compiles to JS. BitBucket repo. You can play the game online too!

Details: This tight-knit group of colleagues — all professional developers, but using unfamiliar technology — produced an incredibly polished app for the demo. The player is presented with a blank cross section, and some money. After choosing what kind of drill bit to start with, the drilling begins and the subsurface is gradually revealed. The game is then a race against the clock and the ever-diminishing funds, as diamonds and other bonuses are picked up along the way. The team used geological models from various German geological surveys for the subsurface, adding a bit of realism.

Prize: Everyone was impressed with the careful design and polish of the app this team created, and the quiet industry they brought to the event. They each won a CellAssist OBD2 device and a copy of Charles Petzold's Code.

Some of the participants waiting for the judges to finish their deliberations. Standing, from left: Håvard Bjerke, Henrique Bueno dos Santos, Steve Purves. Seated: Jesper Dramsch, Lukas Mosser, Natt Turner, Emma Blott, Dario Bendeck, Carlos André, Björn Wieczoreck, Paul Gabriel.

Credits and acknowledgments

Thank you to all the hackers for stepping into the unknown and coming along to the event. I think it was everyone's first hackathon. It was an honour to meet everyone. Special thanks to Jesper Dramsch for all the help on the organizational side, and to Dragan Brankovic for taking care of the photography.

The Impact HUB Vienna was a terrific venue, providing us with multiple event spaces and plenty of room to spread out. HUB hosts Steliana and Laschandre were a great help. Der Mann produced the breakfasts. Il Mare pizzeria provided lunch on Saturday, and Maschu Maschu on Sunday.

Thank you to Kristofer Tingdahl, CEO of dGB Earth Sciences and a highly technical, as well as thoughtful, geoscientist. He graciously agreed to act as a judge for the demos, and I think he was most impressed with the quality of the teams' projects.

Last but far from least, a huge Thank You to the sponsor of the event, EMC, the cloud computing firm that was acquired by Dell late last year. David Holmes, the company's CTO (Energy) was also a judge, making an amazing opportunity for the hackers to show off their skills, and sense of humour, to a progressive company with big plans for our industry.

Toolbox wishlist

Earlier this week, the conversation on Software Underground* turned to well-tie software.

Someone was complaining that, despite having several well-tie tools at their disposal, none of them was quite right. I've written about this phenomenon before. We, as a discipline, do not know how to tie wells. I don't mean that you don't know, I know you know, but I bet if you compared the workflows of ten geoscientists, they would all be different. That's why every legacy well in every project has thirty time-depth tables, including at least three endearingly hopeful ones called final, and the one everyone uses, called test.

As a result of all this, the topic of "what tools do people need?" came up. Leo Uieda, a researcher in Brazil, asked:

I just about remembered that I had put up this very question on Tricider some time ago. Tricider is not a website about apple-based beverages, but a site for sharing and voting on ideas. You can start with a few ideas, get votes and comments on them, and even get new ideas. Here's the top idea as of right now: an open-source petrophysics tool.

Do check out the list, and vote or comment if you like. It might help someone find a project to work on, or spark an idea for a new app or even a new company.

Another result of the well-tie software conversation was, "What are the features of the one well-tie app to rule them all?" I'll leave you to stew on that one for a while. Meanwhile, please share your thoughts in the comments.

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* Software Underground is an open Slack team. In essence, it's a chat room for geocomputing geeks: software, underground, geddit? It's completely free and open to anyone — pop along to http://swung.rocks/ to sign up.

It even has its own radio station!

Notes from a hackathon

The spirit of invention is alive and well in exploration geophysics! Last weekend, Agile hosted the 3rd annual Geophysics Hackathon at Propeller, a large and very cool co-working space in New Orleans, Louisiana.

A community of creative scientists

Commensurate with the lower-than-usual turnout at the SEG Annual Meeting, which our event preceded, we had 15 hackers. The remaining hackers were not competing, but hanging out and self-teaching or hacking around with code.

As in Denver, we had an amazing showing from Colorado School of Mines, with 6 participants. I don't know what's in the water over there in the Rockies, or what the profs have been feeding these students, but it works. Such smart, creative talent. But it can't stay this one-sided... one day we'll provoke Stanford into competitive geophysics programming.

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Other than the Mines crew, we had one other student (Agile's Ben Bougher, who's at UBC), the dynamic wiki duo from SEG, and the rest were professional geoscientists from large and small companies, so it was pretty well balanced between academia and industry.

Thank you

As always, we are indebted to the sponsors and supporters of the hackathon. The event would be impossible without their financial support, and much less fun without their eager participation. This year we teamed up with three companies:

• OpenGeoSolutions, a fantastic group of geophysicists based in Calgary. You won't find better advice on signal processing problems. Jamie Alison and Greg Partyka also regularly do us the honour of judging our hackathon demos, which is wonderful.
• EMC, a huge cloud computing company, generously supported us through David Holmes, their representative for our industry, and a fellow Landmark alum. David also kindly joined us for much of the hackathon, including the judging, which was great for the teams.
• Palladium Consulting, a Houston-based bespoke software house run by Sebastian Good, were a new sponsor this year. Sebastian reached out to a New Orleans friend and business partner of his, Graham Ganssle, to act as a judge, and he was beyond generous with his time and insight all weekend. He also acted as a rich source of local knowledge.

Although he craves no spotlight, I have to recognize the personal generosity of Karl Schleicher of UT Austin, who is one of the most valuable assets our community has. His tireless promotion of open data and open source software is an inspiration.

And finally, Maitri Erwin again visited to judge the demos on Sunday. She brings the perfect blend of a deep and rigorous expertise in exploration geoscience and a broad and futuristic view of technology in the service of humankind. 

I will do a round up of the projects in the next couple of weeks. Look out for that because all of the projects this year were 'different'. In a good way.

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If this all sounds like fun, mark your calendars for 2016! I think we're going to try running it after SEG next year, so set aside 22 and 23 October 2016, and we'll see you there. Bring a team!

PS You can already sign up for the hackathon in Europe at EAGE next year!

The hack is back: learn new skills in New Orleans

Looking for a way to broaden your skills for the next phase of your career? Need some networking that isn't just exchanging business cards? Maybe you just need a reminder that subsurface geoscience is the funnest thing ever? I have something for you...

It's the third Geophysics Hackathon! The most creative geoscience event of the year. Completely free, as always, and fun for everyone — not just programmers. So mark your calendar for the weekend of 17 and 18 October, sign up on your own or with a team, and come to New Orleans for the most creative 48 hours of your career so far.

What is a hackathon?

It's a fun, 2-day event full of geophysics and tech. Most people participate in teams of up to 4 people, but you can take part on your own too. There's plenty of time on the first morning to find projects to work on, or maybe you already have something in mind. At the end of the second day, we show each other what we've been working on with a short demo. There are some fun prizes for especially interesting projects.

You don't have to be a programmer to join the fun. If you're more into geological interpretation, or reservoir engineering, or graphic design, or coming up with amazing ideas — there's a place for you at the hackathon. 

FAQ

• How much does it cost? It's completely free!
• I don't believe you. Believe it. Coffee and tacos will be provided. Just bring a laptop.
• When is it? 17 and 18 October, doors open at 8 am each day, and we go till about 5.30.
• So I won't miss the SEG Icebreaker? No, we'll all go!
• Where is it? Propeller, 4035 Washington Avenue, New Orleans
• How do I sign up? Find out more and register for the event at ageo.co/geohack15

Being part of it all

If this all sounds awesome to you, and you'll be in New Orleans this October, sign up! If you don't think it's for you, please drop in for a visit and a coffee — give me a chance to convince you to sign up next time.

If you own or work for an organization that wants to see more innovation in the world, please think about sponsoring this event, or a future one.

Last thing: I'd really appreciate any signal boost you can offer — please consider forwarding this post to the most creative geoscientist you know, especially if they're in the Houston and New Orleans area. I'm hoping that, with your help, this can be our biggest event ever.

On answering questions

On Tuesday I wrote about asking better questions. One of the easiest ways to ask better questions is to hang back a little. In a lecture, the answer to your question may be imminent. Even if it isn't, some thinking or research will help. It's the same with answering questions. Better to think about the question, and maybe ask clarifying questions, than to jump right in with "Let me explain".

Here's a slightly edited example from Earth Science Stack Exchange: 

I suppose natural gas underground caverns on Earth have substantial volume and gas is in gaseous form there. I wonder how it would look like inside such cavern (with artificial light of course). Will one see a rocky sky at big distance?

The first answer was rather terse:

What is a good answer?

This answer, addressing the apparent misunderstanding the OP (original poster) has about gas being predominantly found in caverns, was the first thing that occurred to me too. But it's incomplete, and has other problems:

• It's not very patient, and comes across as rather dismissive. Not very welcoming for this new user.
• The reference is far from being an appropriate one, and seems to have been chosen randomly.
• It only addresses sandstone reservoirs, and even then only 'typical' ones.

In my own answer to the question, I tried to give a more complete answer. I tried to write down my principles, which are somewhat aligned with the advice given on the Stack Exchange site:

1. Assume the OP is smart and interested. They were smart and curious enough to track down a forum and ask a question that you're interested enough in to answer, so give them some credit. 
2. No bluffing! If you find yourself typing something like, "I don't know a lot about this, but..." then stop writing immediately. Instead, send the question to someone you know that can give a better answer then you.
3. If possible, answer directly and clearly in the first sentence. I usually write it in bold. This should be the closest you can get to a one-word answer, especially if it was a direct question. 
4. Illustrate the answer with an example. A picture or a numerical example — if possible with working code in an accessible, open source language — go a long way to helping someone get further. 
5. Be brief but thorough. Round out your answer with some different angles on the question, especially if there's nuance in your answer. There's no need for an essay, so instead give links and references if the OP wants to know more.
6. Make connections. If there are people in your community or organization who should be connected, connect them.

It's remarkable how much effort people are willing to put into a great answer. A question about detecting dog paw-prints on a pressure pad, posted to the programming community Stack Overflow, elicited some great answers.

The thread didn't end there. Check out these two answers by Joe Kington, a programmer–geoscientist in Houston:

• One epic answer with code and animated GIFs, showing how to make a time-series of pawprints.
• A second answer, with more code, introducing the concept of eigenpaws to improve paw recognition.

A final tip: writing informative answers might be best done on Wikipedia or your corporate wiki. Instead of writing a long response to the post, think about writing it somewhere more accessible, and instead posting a link to your answer. 

What do you think makes a good answer to a question? Have you ever received an answer that went beyond helpful? 

On asking questions

If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is. — Anonymous Yale professor (often wrongly attributed to Einstein)

Asking questions is a core skill for professionals. Asking questions to know, to understand, to probe, to test. Anyone can feel exposed asking questions, because they feel like they should know or understand already. If novices and 'experts' alike have trouble asking questions, if your community or organization does not foster a culture of asking, then there's a problem.

What is a good question?

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question. — Carl Sagan

Asking good questions is the best way to avoid the problem of feeling silly or — worse — being thought silly. Here are some tips from my experience in Q&A forums at work and on the Internet:

1. Do some research. Go beyond a quick Google search — try Google Scholar, ask one or two colleagues for help, look in the index of a couple of books. If you have time, stew on it for a day or two. Do enough to make sure the answer isn't widely known or trivial to find. Once you've decided to ask a network...
2. Ask your question in the right forum. You will save yourself a lot of time by going taking the trouble to find the right place — the place where the people most likely to be able to help you are. Avoid the shotgun approach: it's not considered good form to cross-post in multiple related forums.
3. Make the subject or headline a direct question, with some relevant detail. This is how most people will see your question and decide whether to even read the rest of it. So "Help please" or "Interpretation question" are hopeless. Much better is something like "How do I choose seismic attribute parameters?" or "What does 'replacement velocity' mean?".
4. Provide some detail, and ideally an image. A bit of background helps. If you have a software or programming problem, just enough information needed to reproduce the problem is critical. Tell people what you've read and where your assumptions are coming from. Tell people what you think is going on.
5. Manage the question. Make sure early comments or answers seem to get your drift. Edit your question or respond to comments to help people help you. Follow up with new questions if you need clarification, but make a whole new thread if you're moving into new territory. When you have your answer, thank those who helped you and make it clear if and how your problem was solved. If you solved your own problem, post your own answer. Let the community know what happened in the end.

If you really want to cultivate your skills of inquiry, here is some more writing on the subject...

• How do I ask a good question? — advice from the world's biggest Q&A site
• How to ask questions the smart way — by open-source hacker Eric Raymond
• Ten tips for asking good questions — from For Dummies
• How to be amazingly good at asking questions — by Mike Martel
• How to cultivate the art of asking good questions — Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question

Supply and demand

Knowledge sharing networks like Stack Exchange, or whatever you use at work, often focus too much on answers. Capturing lessons learned, for example. But you can't just push knowledge at people — the supply and demand equation has two sides — there has to be a pull too. The pull comes from questions, and an organization or community that pulls, learns.

Do you ask questions on knowledge networks? Do you have any advice for the curious? 

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Don't miss the next post, On answering questions.

Pick This again

Since I last wrote about it, Pick This! has matured. We have continued to improve the tool, which is a collaboration between Agile and the 100% awesome Steve Purves at Euclidity.

Here's some of the new stuff we've added:

• Multiple lines and polygons for each interpretation. This was a big limitation; now we can pick multiple fault sticks, say.
• 'Preshows', to show the interpreter some text or an image before they interpret. In beta, talk to us if you want to try it.
• Interpreter cohorts, with randomized selection, so we can conduct blind trials.  In beta, again, talk to us.
• Complete picking history, so we can replay the entire act of interpretation. Coming soon: new visualizations of results that use this data.

Some of this, such as replaying the entire picking event, is of interest to researchers who want to know how experts interpret images. Remotely sensed images — whether in geophysics, radiology, astronomy, or forensics — are almost always ambiguous. Look at these faults, for example. How many are there? Where are they exactly? Where are their tips?  

A seismic line from the Browse Basin, offshore western Australia. Data courtesy of CGG and the Virtual Seismic Atlas

Most of the challenges on the site are just fun challenges, but some — like the Browse Basin challenge, above — are part of an experiment by researchers Juan Alcalde and Clare Bond at the University of Aberdeen. Please help them with their research by taking part and making an interpretation! It would also be super if you could fill out your profile page — that will help Juan and Clare understand the results. 

If you're at the AAPG conference in Denver then you can win bonus points by stopping by Booth 404 to visit Juan and Clare. Ask them all about their fascinating research, and say hello from us!

While you're on the site, check out some of the other images — or upload one yourself! This one was a real eye-opener: time-lapse seismic reflections from the water column, revealing dynamic thermohaline stratification. Can you pick this?

Pick This challenge showing time-lapse frames from a marine 3D. The seabed is shown in blue at the bottom of the images.

May linkfest

The pick of the links from the last couple of months. We look for the awesome, so you don't have to :)

ICYMI on Pi Day, pimeariver.com wants to check how close river sinuosity comes to pi. (TL;DR — not very.)

If you're into statistics, someone at Imperial College London recently released a nice little app for stochastic simulations of simple calculations. Here's a back-of-the-envelope volumetric calculation by way of example. Good inspiration for our Volume* app.

I love it when people solve problems together on the web. A few days ago Chris Jackson (also at Imperial) posted a question about converting projected coordinates...

I responded with a code snippet that people quickly improved. Chris got several answers to his question, and I learned something about the pyproj library. Open source wins again!

In answering that question, I also discovered that Github now renders most IPython Notebooks. Sweet!

Speaking of notebooks, Beaker looks interesting: individual code blocks support different programming languages within the same notebook and allow you to pass data from one cell to another. For instance, you could do your basic stuff in Python, computationally expensive stuff in Julia, then render a visualization with JavaScript. Here's a simple example from their site.

Python is the language for science, but JavaScript certainly rules the visual side of the web. Taking after JavaScript data-artists like Bret Victor and Mike Bostock, Jack Schaedler has built a fantastic website called Seeing circles, sines, and signals containing visual explanations of signal processing concepts.

If that's not enough for you, there's loads more where that came from: Gallery of Concept Visualization. You're welcome.

My recent notebook about finding small things with 2D seismic grids sparked some chatter on Twitter. People had some great ideas about modeling non-random distributions, like clustered or anisotropic populations. Lots to think about!

Getting help quickly is perhaps social media's most potent capability — though some people do insist on spoiling everything by sharing U might be a genius if u can solve this! posts (gah, stop it!). Earth Science Stack Exchange is still far from being the tool is can be, but there have been some relevant questions on geophysics lately:

• Why can Thomsen's parameter \(\epsilon\) be negative in VTI media?
• How should I choose the block size in constrained model-based inversion?
• Should one extract wavelets from seismic or well logs for the generation of synthetic traces?
• What are the fields in Petrel's IESX seismic horizon file?
• A couple of questions on mode conversion: one and two

A fun thread came up on Reddit too recently: Geophysics software you wish existed. Perfect for inspiring people at hackathons! I'm keeping a list of hacky projects for the next one, by the way.

Not much to say about 3D models in Sketchfab, other than: they're wicked! I mean, check out this annotated anticline. And here's one by R Mahon based on sedimentological experiments by John Shaw and others...

Rigid Lid Delta by rmahon1 on Sketchfab

Canadian codeshow

Hackers

This is what collaboration looks like

Team gLauncher

Ben & Raquel with their creation: a crowdfunding site for geoscience projects.

Team GLauncher

Ben and Raquel with GLauncher

Steve

Steve Lynch with his visual wavefield creation.

Steve

Steve Lynch showing the fruits of his labour

Team Sketch2Model

Matteo, Elwyn, and Evan with their awesome tool for turning sketches into earth models. 

Matteo

Turning a sketch into a model

Demo time

The sketchy team gives their demo

Hackers

Everybody getting ready for demos

Team Hacksaw

Why doesn't it plot??

A plan

More than a hope and a prayer

Team Hacksaw

Gord, Matt, Gerry and Yongxin with their creation.

Gord

During the demo

Earlier this month we brought the world-famous geoscience hackathon to Calgary, tacking on a geocomputing bootcamp for good measure. Fourteen creative geoscientists came and honed their skills, leaving 4 varied projects in their wake. So varied in fact that this event had the most diversity of all the hackathons so far. 

Thank you to Raquel Theodoro and Penny Colton for all the great photographs. You both did a great job of capturing what went on. Cheers!

Thank you as well to our generous and generally awesome sponsors. These events would not be possible without them.

Bootcamp

The bootcamp was a big experiment. We have taught beginner classes before, but this time we also invited beyond-novice programmers to come and learn together. Rather than making it a classroom experience, we were trying to make a friendly space where people could learn from us, from each other, or from books or the web. After some group discussion about hackathons and dream projects (captured here), we split into two groups: beginners and 'other'. The beginners got an introduction to scientific Python; the others got a web application masterclass from Ben Bougher (UBC master's student and Agile code ninja). During the day, we harvested a pretty awesome list of potential future hackathon projects. 

Hackathon

The hackathon itself yielded four very cool projects, fuelled this time not by tacos but by bánh mì and pizza (separately):

1. Hacking data inside Seismic Terrain Explorer, by Steve Lynch of Calgary
2. Launching GLauncher, a crowdfunding tool, by Raquel Theodoro of Rio de Janeiro and Ben Bougher of UBC
3. Hacksaw: A quick-look for LAS files in a web app, by Gord Foo, Gerry Cao, Yongxin Liu of Calgary, plus me
4. Turning sketches in to models, by Evan Saltman, Elwyn Galloway, and Matteo Niccoli of Calgary, and Ben again

Sketch2model was remarkable for a few reasons: it was the first hackathon for most of the team, they had not worked together before, Elwyn dreamt up the idea more or less on the spot, and they seemed to nail it with a minimum of fuss. Matteo quietly got on with the image processing magic, Evan and Ben modified modelr.io to do the modeling bit, and Elwyn orchestrated the project, providing a large number of example sketches to keep the others from getting too cocky.

We'll be doing it all again in New Orleans this fall. Get it in your calendar now!

The hackathon is coming to Calgary

Before you stop reading and surf away thinking hackathons are not for you, stop. They are most definitely for you. If you still read this blog after me wittering on about Minecraft, anisotropy, and Python practically every week — then I'm convinced you'll have fun at a hackathon. And we're doing an new event this year for newbies.

For its fourth edition, the hackathon is coming to Calgary. The city is home to thousands of highly motivated and very creative geoscience nuts, so it should be just as epic as the last edition in Denver. The hackathon will be the weekend before the GeoConvention — 2 and 3 May. The location is the Global Business Centre, which is part of the Telus Convention Centre on 8th Avenue. The space is large and bright; it should be perfect, once it smells of coffee...

Now's the time to carpe diem and go sign up. You won't regret it. 

On the Friday before the hackathon, 1 May, we're trying something new. We'll be running a one-day bootcamp. you can sign up for the bootcamp here on the site. It's an easy, low-key way to experience the technology and goings-on of a hackathon. We'll be doing some gentle introductions to scientific computing for those who want it, and for the more seasoned hackers, we'll be looking at some previous projects, useful libraries, and tips and tricks for building a software tool in less than 2 days.

The event would definitely not be possible without the help of progressive people who want to see more creativity and invention in our industry and our science. These companies and the people that work there deserve your attention. 

Last quick thing: if you know a geeky geoscientist in Calgary, I'd love it if you forwarded this post to them right now. 

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UPDATE
Great new: Ikon Science are joining our existing sponsors, dGB Earth Sciences and OpenGeoSolutions — both long-time supporters of the hackathon events — to help make something awesome happen. We're grateful for the support!

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UPDATE
More good news: Geomodeling have joined the event as a sponsor. Thank you for being awesome! Wouldn't a geomodel hackathon be fun? Hmm...