Template:Hackathon FAQ

Q: What is the aim of the Hackathon?
A: To learn and have fun hacking FlightGear. Encourage people to get their hands dirty and modify code. Try out new ideas. Working with other people. Ultimately to increase the number of core developers.

Q: What can participants expect to get out of the weekend?
A: The primary goal is for people to learn through experimentation. To try out new ideas and in the process learn about the internals of FlightGear. James, Stuart and Fernando will be be providing coaching over the course of the weekend.

Q: What organization will be provided?
A: We will provide tools for collaboration, and organize a couple of meetings, but not much more. The idea behind hackathons is that participants largely self organize - teams form around interesting ideas on Friday evening and organize themselves. Participants will need to provide their own computers, pizza, Haribo, beer. The last three are traditional, but optional.

Q: How much time do I need to commit?
A: The more the better. A traditional hackathon would be 24-48 hours of solid work with sleep optional. That is not realistic for most people, but 20 hours over the weekend would be a good amount to aim for. Certainly if you can only commit to a couple of evenings you may not get much out of Hackathon.

Q: What skills do I need?
A: It depends on what you want to do. You need to know C/C++ already to be able to hack the core of FlightGear. The Hackathon is not a good place to learn C++ for the first time. However, there are lot of interesting projects using Python, Nasal etc.

Q: I have got a great idea for the Hackathon. What do I do?
A: Great! Create a wiki page describing it to enthuse other people and collect comments (see #Ideation section above), and post a link to the Ideation section above so everyone can see it.