We're hosting another hackathon! This time, we're inviting geologists in all their colourful guises to come and help dream up cool tools, find new datasets, and build useful stuff. Mark your calendar: 5 & 6 April, right before AAPG.

On 4 April there's the added fun of a Creative geocomputing course. So you can learn some skills, then put them into practice right away. More on the course next week.

What's a hackathon?

It's not as scary — or as illegal — as it sounds! And it's not just for coders. It's just a roomful of creative geologists and friendly programmers figuring out two things together:

1. What tools would help us in our work?
2. How can we build those tools?

So for example, we might think about problems like these:

• A sequence stratigraphy calibration app to tie events to absolute geologic time
• Wireline log 'attributes'
• Automatic well-to-well correlation
• Facies recognition from core
• Automatic photomicrograph interpretation: grain size, porosity, sorting, and so on
• A mobile app for finding and capturing data about outcrops
• Sedimentation rate analysis, accounting for unconformities, compaction, and grain size

I bet you can think of something you'd like to build — add it to the list!

Still not sure? Check out what we did at the Geophysics Hackathon last autumn...

How do I sign up?

You can sign up for the creative geocomputing course at Eventbrite.

If you think Rock Hack sounds like a fun way to spend a weekend, please drop us a line or sign up at Hacker League. If you're not sure, please come anyway! We love visitors.

If you think you know someone who'd be up for it, let them know with the sharing buttons below.

The poster image is from an original work by Flickr user selkovjr.