On 14th and 15th June, we attended Safecast hackathon remotely. It is common to join hackathon on site, but rarely remotely. Since it needs a lot of communication during hackathon to cooperate with other members.

To have fast communication, we used Skype for video chat. But sometimes, we need to share text information, so group discussion platform,Slack, is adopted. Both of the 2 communication tools provide the possible environment for remote hackathon.

Then come into the actual work.
Our task is to fixed some issues for Safecast API website. It needed the participants to have their own server side environment, which was the same as the original one so that it won’t affect each other during issue fixing.
At the beginning we setup the environment by ourselves, which costed us a lot to time to do the communication and solved problems. It became more complex when we installed package without the correct version of some packages. And finally we come to the solution of vagrant script. One person prepared the necessary environment, writing all the necessary packages with vagrant scripts in advance. All other participants can enjoy the coffee during the setting up by vagrant automatically.