Web Engines Hackfest 2020: New dates, new venue!
Igalia is pleased to announce the 12th annual Web Engines Hackfest. It will take place on May 18-20 in A Coruña, and in a new venue: Palexco. You can find all the information, together with the registration form, on the hackfest website: https://webengineshackfest.org/2020/.
Mission and vision #
The main goal behind this event is to have a place for people from different parts of the web platform community to meet together for a few days and talk, discuss, draft, prototype, implement, etc. on different topics of interest for the whole group.
There are not many events where browser implementors from different engines can sit together and talk about their last developments, their plans for the future, or the controversial topics they have been discussing online.
However this is an event not only for developers, other roles that are part of the community, like people working on standards, are welcomed to the event.
It’s really nice to have people from different backgrounds and working on a variety of things around the web, to reach better solutions, enlighten the conversations and draft higher quality conclusions during the discussions.
We believe the combination of all these factors make the Web Engines Hackfest an unique opportunity to push forward the evolution of the web.
2020 edition #
We realized that autumn is usually full of browser events (TPAC, BlinkOn, WebKit Contributors Meeting, … just to name a few), and most of the people coming to the hackfest are also attending some of them. For that reason we thought it would be a good idea to move the event from fall to spring, in order to better accommodate everyone’s schedules and avoid unfortunate conflicts or unnecessary hard choices. So next year the hackfest will happen on May from Monday 18th to Wednesday 20th (both days included).
At this stage the event is becoming popular and during the past three years we have been around 60-70 people. Igalia office has been a great venue for the hackfest during all this time, but on the last occasions we were using it as its full capacity. So this time we decided to move the hackfest to a new venue, which will allow us to grow to 100 or more participants, let’s see how things go. The venue would be Palexco, a lovely conferences building in A Coruña port, which is very close to the city center. We really hope you like the new place and enjoy it.
New venue: Palexco
(picture by Jose Luis Cernadas Iglesias)
Having more people and the new venue bring us lots of challenges but also new possibilities. So we’re changing a little bit the format of the event, we’ll have a first day in a more regular conference fashion (with some talks and lighting talks) but also including some space for discussions and hacking. And then the last 2 days will be more the usual unconference format with a bunch of breakout sessions, informal discussions, etc. We believe the conversations and discussions that happen during the hackfest are one of the best things of the event, and we hope this new format will work well.
Join us #
Thanks to the changes on the venue, the event is no longer invitation-only (as it used to be). We’ll be still sending the invitations to the people usually interested on the hackfest, but you can already register by yourself just filling the registration form.
Soon we will open a call for papers for the talks, stay tuned! We’ll also have room for ligthing talks, so people attending can take advantage of them to explain their work and plans on the event.
Last but not least, Arm, Google and Igalia will be sponsoring 2020 edition, thank you very much! We hope more companies join the trend and help us to arrange the event with their support. If your company is willing to sponsor the hackfest, please don’t hesitate to contact us at hackfest@webengineshackfest.org.
Some historical information #
Igalia has been organizing and hosting this event since 2009. Back then, the event was called the “WebKitGTK+ Hackfest”. The WebKitGTK+ project was, on those days, in early stages. There was lots of work to do around the project, and a few people (11 to be specific) decided to work together for a whole week to move the project forward. The event was really successful and it was happening on a similar fashion for 5 years.
On 2014 we decided to make broader the scope of the event and not restrict it to people working only on WebKitGTK+ (or WebKit), but open it to members from all parts of the web platform community (including folks working on other engines like Blink, Servo, Gecko). We changed the name to “Web Engines Hackfest”, we got a very positive response and the event has been running on yearly since then, growing more and more every year.
And now we’re looking forward to 2020 edition, in a new venue and with more people than ever. Let’s hope everything goes great.
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