CloudFest Hackathon, Behind CMS Freedom

Patricia:
Hello, I’m Patricia, I’m from Geneva, French speaking, part of Switzerland. I am not an engineer but I offer services to clients with WordPress sites. So I’m that in the middle place between knowing how to and not knowing how to. So great tools are developed by great people of the community so I can use them and ease the process. And I add that idea for this Hackathon project because that would have been something I would love to have before or discover. So because I was a Hackathon participant last year, I saw that if you do not have yourself the tech skills, you will have the participant to your project coming and mix all the great ideas, the people telling what are the needs and other developing the solution and then propose to have Denis as a colleague and that’s the wonderful idea.

Adam Weeks:
Fantastic. Dennis? Yeah. Share about who you are and how you got here.

Dennis Nell:
Thank you, Adam. I’m Dennis Nell. I’ve been contributing to WordPress for quite some time now. I’ve been working at Automattic for over a decade and I used to use WordPress from the early days, right after I was writing my own content management systems in terrible ways as most young people at the time did. The open Internet has always been important to me. Being able to interoperate with others, to cooperate with others and to share knowledge is really important to me. That’s ultimately why I’m here. And like Patricia, I was here last year and had a great time. I came in last year without any expectations and I was really thrilled at what we came up with. So I knew that coming here again would be worthwhile because you just never know what will happen. A good time to step away, isolate and just hack around together.

Adam Weeks:
Excellent. I’m so glad you guys are both here and have shared that. What problem are you trying to solve.

Patricia:
At this year’s Hackathon with our project, my main goal is build bridge. Bridge. You know, I’m that type of person, like peace and love where we are for the love of open smokes you know, and I see that the problem when people have to restart from scratch if they are switching systems. So the main goal of the project is to ease that process.

Dennis Nell:
Perfect.

Adam Weeks:
Okay.

Dennis Nell:
When Patricia originally proposed the project, I was on board because I care so much about the freedom and long term archival value of the web. But what’s fun in the hackathon sense is like we all sat down yesterday as a table and we tried to determine values for our project. And the project was very broad. This is an extremely broadly scoped project. And so we knew we’d have to kind of pin it down. And what we found out as we were all talking is we all had this. We all thought it was important that people can have choice online. People can preserve content that otherwise might be lost. And we started to form our idea around this narrower scope of let’s take a look at some of the older web that’s still available in places and let’s see if we can kind of bring that alive again. I may not be able to go back and edit a site I did as a high schooler because it’s kind of abandoned or I lost my access or like, what if we could take those and we could bring them alive to the point where we can add new content, edit content, republish on a new server without having the backdoor to the site.

Adam Weeks:
Okay, perfect. All right. So at this point at the hackathon, we’re not quite halfway yet. Maybe this afternoon would be halfway or how we’re so we’re getting. So things are starting to move. We’re right in kind of the thick of the project. How do you feel about the progress? Are you on track?

Patricia:
So I know that Denis, I’ve been working almost all night.

Adam Weeks:
Oh my.

Patricia:
Because he is really passionate and we can see that. And we have also other great team members. I know that Adam is doing also great stuff. You were together last year on the same project. That’s a little bit the following of that. Right. So yeah, that’s progressing a lot with the use of LLMs and there is some like packaging todo around it and like what is going to be shared with first the hackathon and then the world. So, you know, so this is more my part. How to phrase it. Document with another of our team members and. Yeah. And make it available actually.

Dennis Nell:
And the progress is nonlinear. There’s often a temptation if you’re lost to just go somewhere. And what can happen is if you just go, you go in the wrong direction and you actually make resolution take longer and Yesterday we had a lot of good discussion and really important work to find a vision, narrow the scope, and do something. And even at the end of yesterday, it was actually after the official hackathon hours ended, we kind of shifted, you know, we were looking at the map, if you will. We were getting our bearings. And the last 45 minutes to an hour, we accomplished, in my opinion, a lot having reached that consensus. So I’m looking forward to today at the halfway mark, like you said.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Dennis Nell:
Of having significant progress.

Adam Weeks:
Okay, that’s great. What are you the most nervous about or what is your biggest concern? As we, you know, getting to the.

Dennis Nell:
End of the hackathon, our project incorporates a lot of different elements as well as an integration at the end. Okay. And we’ve limited what we’re attempting to do to one platform. We’re going to build a WordPress website from an old site. We wanted originally to be able to dump that, if you will, into any content management firmware. We only have one, but even that one is going to involve some integration pieces host. And so we kind of have to get all of the machines lined up at the same time. And I wouldn’t say I’m too worried about that, but it might mean that tomorrow night, a couple of us don’t sleep much. Oh, my.

Adam Weeks:
Okay. So I’m pretty new to hackathons, but I understand that there are going to be awards at the end. And for those who are listening that are kind of, what is this whole hackathon? Could you guys step back a little bit from specifically your project and what are the different awards? And then I’d love to know if there’s one award that you would like to win that you have your eye on.

Patricia:
I think the success of our project is more important than any award. Maybe the dream team or something, if it’s still one member of our team has been explaining how we’re what he calls reluctant in his school. And there was a lot of competition, no one sleeping, and it was very important. We are the first to reach the goal. You know, here is more like we could even say collaboration and that friendliness atmosphere we have between teams. So I like it very much like that. And even if we do not have any awards, if we are proud of what we built, it’s the goal for me and that it will be useful to people.

Adam Weeks:
Very good. And it’s going to be open source and people will be able to access this forever afterwards.

Patricia:
Yep. That’s to be.

Adam Weeks:
So Patricia was very, you know, dream team. You mentioned that one do you have an award that you’re.

Dennis Nell:
The greatest reward to me is being able to inspire other people. I would love for our project to communicate to someone I didn’t know you could do that, or to say, oh, wow, we can save what we thought was lost. So to me, the greatest reward, again, is being a part of this early vision of the web as an open space, to share human knowledge and to maybe teach some people tricks they didn’t know were possible with existing tools. And to me, you come to a hackathon, the whole goal is to go away saying, I had no idea all the cool things that could happen, especially that could happen in the course of two and a half days. Wow. So very cool.

Adam Weeks:
So for those listening, they’re hearing, okay, there’s this really ambitious project, there’s this hackathon, but it sounds kind of scary. I don’t have the tools or I’m not capable of being a part of a hackathon. What would you tell that person?

Patricia:
I would tell them that’s what I was thinking before last year. So, you know, I have a friend I see at WordPress meetup every month. He has the jacket from the Cloudfest 2023.

Patricia:
And I was like, not envious. That’s not the word. But like, oh, wow. I would like to go as well, but I’m not an engineer. That’s the whole point. And I already said that to Bob last year and even talked about it once in a webcam. You can contribute to great projects with great ideas and with many other skills besides code. We meet the people who we do the outreach, as I say, often the social media, the reaching out to people, and if you don’t know what to do, you probably know someone who knows how to do it or. Yeah, that kind of thing. Last year, I participated to a project because the project lead said, I need your research skills. So that’s how I helped. So I think everyone has their place and the atmosphere also is very welcoming. So as long as you want to learn and go do something and move forward, I think it’s good. Yes. And you learn a lot by doing this.

Dennis Nell:
It’s an exciting atmosphere. The room is full of people doing interesting things and everyone’s going to contribute, everyone’s going to learn. And even for people who don’t think initially that they have much to offer, it’s not a problem because you’re going to be surrounded by people on the team, you’re going to watch how they do it, you’re going to build your skills, you’re going to go to the next hackathon with a much better idea of how to participate. You may surprise yourself at what random skill you have or knowledge that you bring, how that plays into the project. Every project only truly begins once a team of people with real experiences and skills and insights come together. That is what defines the team. So it’s not possible not to think.

Adam Weeks:
On that note, that sounds absolutely perfect. Yeah.

Patricia:
I would encourage everyone who is hesitating to try to come, but it’s full pretty fast. I think so yes. First come and then maybe in two years. You will also picture project and a leader project so that moves forward the advancements of our open source communities.

Adam Weeks:
Perfect. Good, good. All right, thank you both so much. This has been great.