Le meilleur hackathon du monde

Hackathons are short bursts of creative energy, making things that may or may not turn out to be useful. In general, people work in small teams on new projects with no prior planning. The goal is to find a great idea, then manifest that idea as something that (barely) works, but might not do very much, then show it to other people.

Hackathons are intellectually and professionally invigorating. In my opinion, there's no better team-building, networking, or learning event.

The next event will be 10 & 11 June 2017, right before the EAGE Conference & Exhibition in Paris. I hope you can come.

The theme for this event will be machine learning. We had the same theme in New Orleans in 2015, but suffered a bit from a lack of data. This time we will have a collection of open datasets for participants to build off, and we'll prime hackers with a data-and-skills bootcamp on Friday 9 June. We did this once before in Calgary – it was a lot of fun. 

Can you help?

It's my goal to get 52 participants to this edition of the event. But I'll need your help to get there. Please share this post with any friends or colleagues you think might be up for a weekend of messing about with geoscience data and ideas. 

Other than participants, the other thing we always need is sponsors. So far we have three organizations sponsoring the event — Dell EMC is stepping up once again, thanks to the unstoppable David Holmes and his team. And we welcome Sandstone — thank you to Graham Ganssle, my Undersampled Radio co-host, who I did not coerce in any way.

If your organization might be awesome enough to help make amazing things happen in our community, I'd love to hear from you. There's info for sponsors here.

If you're still unsure what a hackathon is, or what's so great about them, check out my November article in the Recorder (Hall 2015, CSEG Recorder, vol 40, no 9).

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.

READY PLAYER 1

The Subsurface Hackathon 2016 is over! Seventeen hackers gathered for the weekend at Impact HUB Vienna — an awesome venue and coworking space — and built geoscience-based games. I think it was the first geoscience hackathon in Europe, and I know it was the first time a bunch of geoscientists have tried to build games for each other in a weekend.

What went on 

The format of the event was the same as previous events: gather on Saturday, imagine up some projects, start building them by about 11 am, and work on them until Sunday at 4. Then some demos and a celebration of how amazingly well things worked out. All interspersed with coffee, food, and some socializing. And a few involuntary whoops of success.

What we made

The projects were all wonderful, but in different ways. Here's a quick look at what people built:

• Trap-tris — a group of lively students from the University of Leeds and the Technical University of Denmark built a version of Tetris that creates a dynamic basin model. 
• Flappy Seismic — another University of Leeds student, one from Imperial College, and a developer from Roxar, built a Flappy Bird inspired seismic interpretation game.
• DiamonChaser (sic) — a team of devs from Giga Infosystems in Freiberg built a very cool drilling simulation game (from a real geomodel) aimed at young people.
• Guess What — a developer from Spain and two students from UNICAMP in Brazil built a 'guess the reflection coefficient' game for inverting seismic.

I will write up the projects properly in a week or two (this time I promise :) so you can see some screenshots and links to repos and so on... but for now here are some more pictures of the event.

The fun this year was generously sponsored by EMC. David Holmes, the company's CTO (Energy), spent his weekend hanging out at the venue, graciously mentoring the teams and helping to provide some perspective or context, and help carrying pizza boxes through the streets of Vienna, when it was needed.

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Click on the hackathon tag below to read about previous hackathons

Look ahead to EAGE 2016

I'm in Vienna for the 78th EAGE Conference and Exhibition, at Wien Messe, starting on Sunday. And, of course, for the Subsurface Hackathon, which I've already mentioned a few times. 

The hackathon, is, as usual, over the weekend. It starts tomorrow, in this amazing coworking space. That's @JesperDramsch there, getting ready for the hackathon!

I know this doesn't suit everyone, but weekdays don't suit everyone either. I've also always wanted to get people out of 'work mode', into the idea that they can create whatever they want. Maybe we'll try one during the week some time; do let me know what you think about it in the comments. Feedback helps.

Don't worry, you will hear more about the hackathon. Stay tuned.

Open source software in applied geosciences

The first conference event I'll be at is the workshop on open source software. This follows up on similar get-togethers in Copenhagen in 2012 and in Vienna in 2006. I hope the fact that the inter-workshop interval is getting shorter is a sign that open source geoscience software is gaining traction!

The workshop is being organized by Filippo Broggini (of ETH Zürich), Sergey Fomel (University of Texas), Thomas Günther (LIAG Hannover), and Russell Hewett (Total). They have put together a great-looking program. In the morning, Kristofer Tingdahl (CEO of dGB Earth Sciences) will talk about business models for open source. Then Sergey Fomel will update us on Madagascar seismic processing toolbox. Finally, in a series of talks, Jeff Shragge (Univ. Western Australia), Bob Clapp (Stanford), and Bill Symes (Rice) will talk about using Madagascar and other geophysical imaging and inversion tools at a large scale and in parallel.

After lunch, there's a veritable parade of updates and new stuff, with all of these projects checking in:

• OpenSeaSeis, which raised a lot of eyebrows in 2012 for its general awesomeness. Now a project at Colorado School of Mines.
• SES3D, a package from ETHZ for seismic waveform modeling and inversion.
• BasinVis, a MATLAB program for modeling basin fill and subsidence (woo! Open source geology!!)
• OpenFOAM, a new open source toolbox for fluid mechanics.
• PyGIMLi, a geophysical modeling and inversion package.
• PySIT, the Python seismic imaging toolbox that Russell Hewett started while at MIT.
• Seismic.jl and jInv (that's j-inv), two Julia packages you need to know about.

Aaaand at the very end of the day, is a talk from your truly on 'stuff we can do to get more open source goodness in geoscience'. I'll post some version of the talk here when I can.

Talks and stuff

I don't have any plans for Tuesday and Wednesday, other than taking in some talks and posters. I'm missing Thursday. Picking talks is hard, especially when there are 15 (yup) parallel sessions,... and that's just the oral presentations. (Hey! Conference organizer people! That's crazy!) These conference apps that get ever-so-slightly-better each year won't be really useful until they include a recommendation engine of some sort. I'd like two kinds of recommendation: "stuff that's aligned with my interests but you will disagree with everyone in there", and "stuff that doesn't seem to be aligned with my interests, but maybe it really is".

Oh and also "stuff that isn't too far away from the room I'm in right now because I only have 80 seconds to get there".

Anyway, I haven't chosen my sessions yet, let alone started to trawl through the talk titles. You can probably guess the session titles — Carbonate Petrophysics, Multiple Attenuation, Optimizing Full Waveform Marine Acquisition for Quantitative Exploration II (just kidding).

There are some special sessions I may seek out. There's one for professional women in geoscience and engineering, and two for young professionals, one of which is a panel discussion. Then there are two 'dedicated sessions': Integrated Data for Geological and Reservoir Models, and Towards Exascale Geophysical Applications, which sounds intriguing... but their programmes look like the usual strings of talks, so I'm not sure why they're singled out. There's also something called EAGE Forum, but I can't tell what that is.

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Arbitrary base 10 milestone!

I don't pay as much attention to blog stats as I used to, but there is one number that I've been keeping an eye on lately: the number of posts. This humble little post is the 500th on this blog! Kind of amazing, though I'm not sure what it says about me and Evan, in terms of making sound decisions about how we spend our evenings. I mean, if each post is 600 words,... that's two good-sized novels!

I'm not saying they're good novels...

The images of the Impact HUB Vienna that don't have Jesper in them are CC-BY-SA by the HUB.

A European geo-gaming hackathon

I'm convinced that hackathons are the best way to get geoscientists and engineers inventing and collaborating in new ways. They are better for learning than courses. They are better for networking than parties. And they nearly always have tacos! 

If you are unsure what a hackathon is, or why I'm so enthusiastic about them, you can read my November article in the Recorder (Hall 2015, CSEG Recorder, vol 40, no 9).

The next hackathon will be 28 and 29 May in Vienna, Austria — right before the EAGE Conference and Exhibition. You can sign up right now! Please get it in your calendar and pass it along.

Throwing down the gauntlet

Colorado School of Mines has dominated the student showing at the last 2 autumn hackathons. I know there are plenty more creative research groups out there. Come out and show the world your awesomeness — in teams of up to 4 people — and spend a weekend learning and coding. Also: there will be beer.

To everyone else: this is not a student event, it's for everyone. Most of the participants in the past have been professionals, but the more diverse it is, the more we all get out of it. So don't ask yourself if you'll fit in — you will. 

A word about the fee

Our previous hackathons have been free, but this one has a small fee. It's an experiment. Like most free events, no-shows are a challenge; I'm hoping the fee reduces the problem. If the fee makes it difficult for you to join us, please get in touch — I do not want it to be a barrier.

Just to be clear: these events do not make money. Previous events have been generously sponsored — and that's the only way they can happen. We need support for this one too: if you're a champion of creativity in science and want to support this event, you can find me at matt@agilegeoscience.com, or you can read more about sponsorship here.

Details

The dates are 28 and 29 May. The event will run 8 till 6 (or so) on both the Saturday and the Sunday. We don't have a venue finalized yet. Ideas and contributions of any kind are welcome — this is a community event.

The theme this year will be Games. If you have ideas, share them in the comments! Here are some random project ideas to get you going...

• Acquisition optimizer: lay out the best geometry to image the geology.
• Human inversion: add geological layers to match a seismic trace.
• Drill wells on a budget to make the optimal map of an unseen surface.
• Which geological section matches the (noisy) seismic section?
• Top Trumps for global 3D seismic surveys, with data scraped from press releases.
• Set up the best processing flow based for a modeled, noisy shot gather.

It's going to be fun! If you're traveling to EAGE this year, I hope we see you there!

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Photo of Vienna by Nic Piégsa, CC-BY. Photo of bridge by Dragan Brankovic, CC-BY.

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.

View fullsize

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.

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 perfect storm

Since starting Agile late in 2010, I have never not been busy. Like everyone else... there's always a lot going on. But March was unusual. Spinning plates started wobbling. One or three fell. One of those that fell was the blog. (Why is it always your favourite plate that smashes?)

But I'm back, feeling somewhat refreshed after my accidental quadrennial sabbatical and large amounts of Easter chocolate. And I thought a cathartic way to return might be to share with you what I've been up to.

Writing code for other people

We've always written code to support our consulting practice. We've written seismic facies algorithms, document transformation routines (for AAPG Wiki), seismic acquisition tools, and dozens of other things besides. But until January we'd never been contracted to build software as an end in itself.

Unfortunately for my sanity, the projects had to be finished by the end of March. The usual end-of-project crunch came along, as we tried to add features, fix bugs, remove cruft, and compile documentation without breaking anything. And we just about survived it, thanks to a lot of help from long-time Agile contributor, Ben Bougher. One of the products was striplog, a new Python library for manipulating well data, especially irregularly sampled, interval-based, qualitative data like cuttings descriptions. With some care and feeding, I think it might be really useful one day.

The HUB is moving

Alongside the fun with geoscience, we're in the midst of a fairly huge renovation. As you may know, I co-founded The HUB South Shore in my town in 2013. It's where I do my Agile work, day-to-day. It's been growing steadily and last year we ran out of space to accept new members. So we're moving down to the Main Street in Mahone Bay, right under the town's only pub. It's a great space, but it turns out that painting a 200 m² warehouse takes absolutely ages. Luckily, painting is easy for geologists, since it's basically just a lot of arm-waving. Anyway, that's where I'm spending my free time these days. [Pics.]

MAder's Wharf, by the frozen ocean.

The ship's knees

Co-founder Dave painting trim

Shovelling snow

What my house has looked like for the last 8 weeks.

Seriously, it just will. Not. Stop. It's snowing now, for goodness sake. I'm pretty sure we have glaciers.

What does this have to do with work? Well, we're not talking about Calgary-style pixie dust here. We ain't nipping out with the shovel for a few minutes of peaceful exercise. We're talking about 90 minutes of the hardest workout you've ever endured, pointlessly pushing wet snow around because you ran out of places to put it three weeks ago. At the end, when you've finished and/or given up, Jack Frost tosses a silver coin to see if your reward will be a hot shower and a course of physiotherapy, or sudden cardiac arrest and a ride in the air ambulance.

Events

There is lots of good techno-geophysics to look forward to. We're running the Geoscience Hackathon in Calgary at the beginning of May. You can sign up here... If you're not sure, sign up anyway: I guarantee you'll have fun. There's a bootcamp too, if you're just starting out or want some tips for hacking geophysics. Thank you to our awesome sponsors:

There's also the geophysics mini-symposium at SciPy in Austin in July (deadline approaching!). That should be fun. And I'm hoping the hackathon right before SEG in New Orleans will be even more epic than last year's event. The theme: Games.

Evan is out there somewhere

Normally when things at Agile World Headquarters get crazy, we can adapt and cope. But it wasn't so easy this time: Evan is on leave and in the middle of an epic world tour with his wife Tara. I don't actually know where he is right now. He was in Bali a couple of weeks ago... If you see him say Hi!

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As I restart the engines on All The Things, I want to thank anyone who's been waiting for an email reply, or — in the case of the 52 Things... Rock Physics authors — a book, for their patience. Sometimes it all hits at once.

Onwards and upwards!

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...