Project Overview#

Collaborative projects are a key component of OceanHackWeek, in which you get to interact with others closely and apply new skills to make something exciting happen: it can be creating tools to streamline access of a particular data source, visualizing some high density data interactively, testing existing models with new data sources, or anything else you may want to do at the intersection of oceanography and data science.

Tips for getting started#

  • Potentially choose something that you’ve been interested but haven’t had the time or skills to do before, or something you can continue to work on post OceanHackWeek!

  • Hacking is a community activity! It’s okay to choose projects that you can’t accomplish alone as other people will be there to help you, both at OceanHackWeek and outside of it!

  • Help your group member: you might be the person they need to solve their problem, and vice versa.

  • When discussing, pitch your explanation to the least experienced hacker in the group, and you’ll end up better understanding what you’re trying to do, or need to revise your idea.

  • You can mix programming languages as needed in order to get started, but do check in with your project mentors and group members to make sure your efforts are straightforward to be absorbed into the project.

What is a Hack?#

A “hack” is a small project that aims to solve a specific problem using computational tools.

Examples of hacks include:

  • Build a working demo of a new or modified algorithm

  • Outline of a larger project, with some key features scoped

  • Visualization of an old dataset in a new manner

  • Modify an algorithm and apply it to a new dataset

  • Combine two pre-existing pieces of code to perform some new function

  • Create a tool to apply to work with existing code, datasets

  • Transform code from one language to another to use with other tools

  • Update old code to run faster, on new machines, and/or more efficiently

  • Extend an existing project with an additional feature

  • Simplify code to be more maintainable, aka “paying technical debt”

Why hack at OceanHackWeek?#

Increasingly, research and software development are conducted by groups of people with diverse skills and backgrounds. We believe this collaborative work leads to more innovative solutions to complex problems. At OceanHackWeek, our goal is to explore with you some of the skills needed to navigate technical and social challenges of working in these kinds of collaborative settings. We believe the best way to do so is to provide opportunities for you to gain hands-on experience in working together with others on a well-defined problem related to ocean sciences.