Around the world, Around the world

— Daft Punk, Around the world

So, you still heard that unfounded myth that it is hard to get involved with and to start contributing to LibreOffice? Still? Even though that there are our Easy Hacks and the LibreOffice developer are a friendly bunch that will help you get started on mailing lists and on IRC? If those alone do not convince you, it might be because it is admittedly much easier to get started if you meet people face to face — like on one of our upcoming Events! Especially our Hackfests are a good way to get started. The next one will be at the University de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria were we had been guests last year already. We presented some introduction talks to the students of the university and then went on to hack on LibreOffice from fixing bugs to implementing new stuff. Here is how that looked like last year:

One thing we learned from previous Hackfests was that it is great if newcomers have a way to start working on code right away. While it is rather easy to do that as the 5 minute video on our wiki shows, it might still take some time on some notebooks. So what if you spontaneously show up at the event without a pre-build LibreOffice? Well for that, we now have — thanks to Christian Lohmaier of the Document Foundation staff — remote virtual machines prepared for Hackfests, that allow you to get started right away with everything prepared — on rather beefy hardware even, that is.

If you are a student at ULPGC or live in Las Palmas or on the Canary Islands, we invite you to join us to learn how to get started. For students, this is also a very good opportunity get involved and prepare for a Google Summer of Code on LibreOffice. Furthermore, if you are a even casual contributor to LibreOffice code already and want to help out sharing and deepen knowledge on how to work on LibreOffice code, you should get in contact with the Document Foundation — while the event is already very soon now, there still might be travel reimbursal available. You will find all the details on the wiki page for the Hackfest in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 2015.

On the other hand, if two weeks is too short a notice for you, but the rest of this sounds really tempting, there is already the next Hackfest planned, which will take place in Cambridge in the United Kingdom in May. We will be there with a Hackfest for the first time and invite you to join us from anywhere in Europe if you either are a LibreOffice code contributor or if you are interested in learning more on how to become one. Again, there is a wiki page with the details on the LibreOffice Hackfest in Cambridge 2015, and travel reimbursals are available. Contact us!