Take one, make one

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There’s a teaching method originating in medicine known as “see one, do one, teach one”. I like it because it underscores hands-on practice and knowledge sharing as essential steps in developing a craft — and it works. Today, I want to urge you to take a challenge, then make one for others.

First, what’s the challenge?

A couple of years ago, inspired by the annual Advent of Code challenges, we introduced the kata, a set of coding challenges especially for geoscientists. For a long time we sent them to students in our Geocomputing class, to encourage them to keep coding. Now we just tell everyone about them.

At the time we announced the kata, there were five puzzles. Today, there are 11: four beginner-friendly challenges, four intermediate ones, and three quite hard ones. Topics range from data munging to map indexing, and from digital elevation models to fractures.

💡 If you want to try one, this Colab is the easiest way to get started: https://ageo.co/kata-live

Now make one!

Once you’ve got an idea of how these things work, you might want to try your hand at making one. Once you have an idea for a short task, you need a way to generate a random dataset. For example, for the sample-names challenge, I have a function that generates a random set of sample names, composed of several parts (a number, a basin, a formation, a data, etc).

When you have a dataset, you can ask some questions about it. Start with an one, and build from there. The last question (there can be 3 or 4), should be a somewhat realistic challenge for this kind of data. Each question needs a hint, and each question must have only one possible answer (this is the tricky bit!).

If you fancy trying your hand at it, check out our new kata-dev repository on GitHub. There is a demo challenge there, which is also live on the kata server, so you can see how it all works. Good luck!

Whether or not you try making a challenge for your peers, so let us know how you get on in the #kata-challenges channel on the Software Underground. We’re always ready to answer questions about them.

Get a telescope!

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In the recent How deep are the presents? post, I mentioned that I got a telescope this year — and I encouraged you to get one, because I kind of wish I’d got mine years ago. Since the observing conditions aren’t great tonight and I’m indoors anyway, I thought I’d elaborate a bit.

Not Hubble

The fun might not be obvious to all. Superficially, the experience is terrible — you read about some interesting object, noting its spectacular appearance in the obligatory Hubble photo, only to spend 45 minutes hunting for it before realizing it must be that dim grey smudge you tried to wipe off the eyepiece half an hour ago.

Messier 51: the Whirlpool Galaxy, which is actually a pair of colliding galaxies about 23 million light years away. What you’re expecting (left) vs what you might see on a really dark night with a lot of patience (right).

And yet… you did find it. Out in the dark, on your own, among the owls and foxes, you made an observation. You navigated to it, learning the names of ancient constellations and asterisms. You found out that it’s a pair of colliding galaxies 23 million light years away, and we know that because we can measure the light from individual stars they contain. Its photons were absorbed, after 23 million years oscillating through space, by your retinal cells. And maybe, just possibly, you glimpsed its archetypal spiral arms. And you ticked another Messier object off your list. Thirty minutes well spent! On to the next thing…

There are so many things to see

I knew it would be pretty cool to be able to see Saturn’s rings and the surface of the Moon, but a lot of things have been surprising to me:

  • Jupiter and Saturn are genuinely breathtaking. Seeing the moons of Jupter change continuously, or a shadow pass across its face, is remarkable — it’s the view that changed Galileo’s, then humanity’s, understanding of the universe, proving that Earth is not the centre of every celestial body’s orbit.

  • The moon looks different every day. This is obvious, of course, but with a decent telescope, you can see individual mountains and valleys pass from obscurity into high contrast, and then into blinding sunlight. The only trouble is that once it’s well-lit, the moonlight basically obliterates everything else.

  • Indeed, the whole sky changes continuously. Every month it advances two hours — so in January you can see at 8 pm what you had to wait until 10 pm for in December. So every month’s non-moonlit fortnight is different, with new constellations full of new objects appearing over the eastern horizon.

  • There’s a ready-made list of achievements for beginners to unlock, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. The objects on Charles Messier’s list of 110 “things that aren’t comets” are, because his late-18th-Century telescope was rubbish, fairly easy to observe — even from places that aren’t especially dark.

  • Many of the objects on that list are mind-blowingly cool. The colliding galaxies of M51 were the first thing I pointed my telescope at. M57, the famous Ring Nebula, is tiny but perfect and jewel-like. M42 is legitimately gasp-inducing. M13, the Great Globular Cluster, is extraordinarily bright and beautiful.

If you do start observing the night sky, I strongly recommend keeping a journal. You’ll quickly forget what you saw, and besides it’s fun to look back on all the things you’ve found. My own notes are pretty sketchy, as you can see below, but they have helped me learn the craft and I refer back to them quite often.

Buying a telescope

Telescopes are one of those purchases that can throw you into analysis paralysis, so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned as a noob stargazer.

  • Whatever you’re buying, buy from a telescope shop or online store that serves astronomers. If at all possible, don’t go to Amazon, a sporting goods store, or a department store.

  • If you’re spending under about $200, get the best binoculars you can find instead of a telescope. Look for aperture, not magnification (e.g. for 10 x 50 bins, 10 is the magnification, 50 is the aperture in mm). Just be aware that anything with an aperture greater than about 50 mm will start to get heavy and may need a tripod (and a binocular screw mount) to use effectively. Ideally, try some out in a shop.

  • Like lots of other things (groceries, bikes, empathy), telescopes are hard to find at the moment. So focus on what’s available — unless you are prepared to wait. There are good scopes available now, just maybe not that exact one you were looking for.

  • There are three basic kinds of optical telescope the beginner needs to know about: refractors, reflectors, and catadioptrics (a bit of both). I recommend going for a reflector, because big ones are cheap, and you can see more with a big scope. On the downside, they do get quite large and once you hit a 12-inch mirror, awkward to store, manoeuvre, and transport.

  • I know technology is cool, but if at all possible you should forget about fancy electronics, ‘go-to’ mounts, GPS-this, WiFi-that, and so on — for now. Relatedly, forget about anything to do with photographing the heavens. Unless you’ve been at it for a couple of years already (why are you reading this?), wait.

  • For your first scope, you’re looking for an alt-azimuth or Dobsonian mount, not an equatorial one. They aren’t ideal for taking photographs of anything other than very bright objects, but they are perfect for visual observation.

  • Don’t buy any extra doo-dads, except maybe a collimator (your scope will need aligning now and again), some sort of finder (red-dot finders are popular), and a moon filter (once its past first quarter, it’s too bright to look at). Everything else can wait. (Many scopes include these items though, so do check.)

I think that’s all the advice I’m entitled to offer at this point. But don’t just take it from me, here are some awesome “buying your first telescope” videos:

After much deliberation, I bought a Sky-Watcher Flextube 250P, which is a non-motorized, Dobsonian-mounted, 250-mm (10-inch) aperture Newtonian reflector. It’s been a delight, and I highly recommend it. If you decide to take the plunge, good luck! And do let me know how it goes.

How deep are the presents?

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As December rolls around again, thoughts turn to the Advent of Code, I mean Christmas, Jul, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ōmisoka, Newtonmas, Solstice, Dongzhi, or whatever you like to celebrate at this time of year. The end of 2021 is arguably sufficient cause for celebration on its own. Just don’t let your guard down in 2022!

Now, wherever you are, light the fire, chill out in the shade, pour yourself a glass of what you fancy, and check out this list of nerdtastic gifts for your favourite geoscientist, retired geoscientist, or geoscientist-to-be.

Actual rock

When giving to a geologist, you can’t go wrong with actual rock. Henk Kombrink and Kirstie Wright have been preparing and shipping beautiful pieces of North Sea core for several years now. These things cost millions of dollars to bring to the surface! Seriously useful for teaching, but also just lovely to look at.

You also can’t go wrong with soap. Geologists are filthy.

Look up not down

Geologists usually look down, but I got myself a telescope this year and I love it. I really appreciate the quiet focus of picking my way around the night sky, and the mind-bending experience of gazing at a galaxy of 100 billion stars whose photons have been traveling through space since the Oligocene. Highly recommended for any scientist! But the question is… out of the 100 billion different telescopes out there, which one do you get?

I think I’ll write a more detailed post about this soon, but for now I’ll keep it brief. If you can afford to spend more than about $250, get a simple reflector (aka ‘Newtonian’) telescope with a 6- to 10-inch (150 mm to 250 mm) mirror on a simple, non-motorized alt-azimuth mount. This combo is often called a ‘Dobsonian’, or Dob for short, and I think it offers the best value, and the best experience, for the beginner. Here’s one (right).

On the other hand, if you’re looking to spend less than about $250, get binoculars instead — something like 8×42 or 10×50 is ideal. Or split the difference with these very nice Nikon Prostaff 5 10×42. The beauty is that when geologists are allowed back in the field again, these bins can double as field glasses.

Why are scientists always pictured with glasses?

I don’t know but I do know that I love these laboratory-inspired drinking vessels from PTWare and these even more authentic-looking (not to mention somewhat cheaper) ones from a restaurant trade site.

You can also go with the novelty look, like this stratigraphic glass — or this one on the right featuring women of science, including the astronomer and (callback!) first female salaried scientist, Caroline Herschel, and none other than (segué!) rock botherer Mary Anning.

The obligatory books section

There is no shortage of books about Mary Anning, but this new picture book for kids stood out. I have not read it, but judging by its reviews, people like it a lot: Mary Anning by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara & Popy Matigot. It is one in a new series of factual children’s books from Francis Lincoln books called Little People, Big Dreams — there are lots of scientists in the list along with Anning.

For the grown-ups, there are a lot of interesting-looking new books on my watch list. It seems geology books are hot again!

Last thing

I know it’s very 2021, but don’t you dare buy anyone an NFT. Those things are ridiculous.

Unlike most images on agilescientific.com, the ones in this post are not my property and are not open access. They are the copyright of their respective owners, and I’m using them here in accordance with typical Fair Use terms. If you’re an owner and you don’t like it, please let me know.

Projects from the Geothermal Hackathon 2021

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The second Geothermal Hackathon happened last week. Timed to coincide with the Geosciences virtual event of the World Geothermal Congress, our 2-day event brought about 24 people together in the famous Software Underground Chateau (I’m sorry if I missed anyone!). For comparison, last year we were 13 people, so we’re going in the right direction! Next time I hope we’re as big as one of our ‘real world’ events — maybe we’ll even be able to meet up in local clusters.

Here’s a rundown of the projects at this year’s event:

Induced seismicity at Espoo, Finland

Alex Hobé, Mohsen Bazagan and Matteo Niccoli

Alex’s original workflow for creating dynamic displays of microseismic events was to create thousands of static images then stack them into a movie, so the first goal was something more interactive. On Day 1 Alex built a Plotly widget with a time zoomer/slider in a Jupyter Notebook. On day 2 he and Matteo tried Panel for a dynamic 3D plot. Alex then moved the data into LLNL Visit for fully interactive 3D plots. The team continues to hack on the idea.

geothermal_hack_2021_seismic.png

Fluid inclusions at Coso, USA

Diana Acero-Allard, Jeremy Zhao, Samuel Price, Lawrence Kwan, Jacqueline Floyd, Brendan, Gavin, Rob Leckenby and Martin Bentley

Diana had the idea of a gas analysis case study for Coso Field, USA. The team’s specific goal was to develop visualization tools for interetpaton of fluid inclusion gas data to identify fluid types, regions of permeability, and geothermal processes. They had access to analyses from 29 wells, requiring the usual data science workflow: find and load the data, clean the data, make some visualizations and maps, and finally analyse the permeability. GitHub repo here.

geothermal_hack_2021_fluid-incl.png

Utah Forge data pipeline

Andrea Balza, Evan Bianco, and Diego Castañeda

Andrea was driven to dive into the Utah FORGE project. Navigating the OpenEI data portal was a bit hit-and-miss, having to download files to get into ZIP files and so on (this is a common issue with open data repositories). The team eventually figured out how to programmatically access the files to explore things more easily — right from a Jupyter Notebook. Their code for any data on the OpenEI site, not just Utah FORGE, so it’s potentially a great research tool. GitHub repo here.

geothermal_hack_2021_forge.png

Pythonizing a power density estimation tool

Irene Wallis, Jan Niederau, Hannah Wood, Will Middlebrook, Jeff Jex, and Bill Cummings

Like a lot of cool hackathon projects, this one started with spreadsheet that Bill created to simplify the process of making power density estimates for geothermal fields under some statistical assumptions. Such a clear goal always helps focus the mind and the team put together some Python notebooks and then a Streamlit app — which you can test-drive here! From this solid foundation, the team has plenty of plans for new directions to take the tool. GitHub repo here.

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Computing boiling point for depth

Thorsten Hörbrand, Irene Wallis, Jan Niederau and Matt Hall

Irene identified the need for a Python tool to generate boiling-point-for-depth curves, accommodating various water salinities and chemistries. As she showed during her recent TRANSFORM tutorial (which you must watch!), so-called BPD curves are an important part of geothermal well engineering. The team produced some scripts to compute various scenarios, based on corrections in the IAPWS standards and using the PHREEQC aqueous geochemistry modeling software. GitHub repo here.

geothermal_hack_2021_bpd-curves.png

A big Thank You to all of the hackers that came along to this virtual event. Not quite the same as a meatspace hackathon, admittedly, but Gather.town + Slack was definitely an improvement over Zoom + Slack. At least we have an environment in which people can arrive and immediately get a sense of what is happening in the event. When you realize that people at the tables are actually sitting in Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland, South Africa, and Auckland — it’s clear that this could become an important new way to collaborate across large distances.

geothermal_hack_2021_chateau.png

Do check out all these awesome and open-source projects — and check out the #geothermal channel in the Software Underground to keep up with what happens next. We’ll be back in the future — perhaps the near future! — with more hackathons and more geothermal technology. Hopefully we’ll see you there! 🌋

Rock, paper, scissors: the perfect gift

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It’s winter festival time again. Pat yourself on the back for showing 2020 that it’s going to take more than a global pandemic, environmental chaos, and geopolitical instability to see you off. Hold your dear ones near and let’s all look forward to no more of whatever the heck this year was.

In the meantime, maybe you’re looking for a gift to brighten the life of your favourite geologist — or maybe you want to appreciate a favourite science teacher, or gear up for more home-schooling, or perhaps you just like nerdy things. Whatever the reason, I’ve got you covered for ideas.

Is this a diorite I see before me?

The only way geologists can really tell what anything is, is by getting really close… then licking it. But then they also want a really good look, and for that they’ll need a handlens. The best kind have triple lenses, and the most generally useful ones are 10x or 14x magnification. There are only three you need to know about:

Iwamoto Achromatic — Japanese tech, Japanese prices. USD ~110.

Bausch + Lomb Hastings — solid US–Canadian product. USD ~40.

BelOMO Triplet — based in Minsk, these get great reviews. USD ~30.

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More instruments!

I don’t think most people realise they want a sundial… until they see one of these Präzisionssonnenuhr. Admittedly, they are pretty expensive at EUR1000, and they also take weeks to arrive, but maybe you can save up and plan ahead for 2021!

xmas_2020_sundial.jpg

When it comes to geoscientific instruments, geophysicist and podcaster John Leeman has you covered. His workshop in Arkansas, USA, is capable of making more or less anything you can think of. He just started selling these awesome desktop sandboxes for making your own faultscapes. (Sand not included; I think you need about 2 kg to make a model.)

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Outcrop in the kitchen

When Zane Jobe (Colorado School of Mines) tweeted about his trip to Denver Stone Collection, which included this beauty (below), most of the geologists on Twitter got very excited. The collection is online, check it out. There are no prices, but I think prices on the order of USD100 per square foot are typical. I’m sure some of these are double that.

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Staying in the kitchen, how about…

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Unlike most images on agilescientific.com, the ones in this post are not my property and are not open access. They are the copyright of their respective owners, and I’m using them here in accordance with typical Fair Use terms. If you’re an owner and you don’t like it, please let me know.

The deep time clock

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Check out this video by a Finnish Lego engineer on the Brick Experiment Channel (BEC):

This brilliant, absurd machine — which fits easily on a coffee table — made me think about geological time.

Representing deep time is a classic teaching problem in geoscience. Most of them are variants of “Imagine the earth’s history compressed into 24 hours” and use a linear scale. It’s amazing how even the Cretaceous is only 25 minutes long, and humans arrived a few seconds ago. These memorable and effective demos have been blowing people’s minds for years.

Clocks with v e r y s l o w hands

I think an even nicer metaphor is the clock. Although non-linear, it’s instantly familiar, even if its inner workings of cogs and gears are not. We all understand how the hands move with different periods (especially if you’ve ever had a dull job). So this image (right) from the video is, I think, a nice lead-in to what ends up being a mind-exploding depiction of deep time, beyond anything you can do with a linear analogy.

Indeed, if the googol-gear-machine viking minifigure rotation was a day, the Cretaceous essentially doesn’t exist. Nothing does, it’s just 24 hours of protons decaying.

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After a couple of giant gears, the engineer adds this chain of gears (below). Once attached to the rest of the machine, these things — the first 10 of them anyway — are essentially the hands on a geological clock.

geological_time_cogs.png

The first hand on this clock, so to speak, turns once every 4999 years. This is not a bad unit of measure if you’re looking at earth surface processes. Then each new gear multiplies by a factor of 40/8, so the next one is 25 ka, and the next 125 ka — around the domain of Milankovich cycles. Then things start getting really geological. The 5th clock hand does one rotation every 3.1 million years, then the 6th is 15.6 Ma. Unfortunately it quickly gets out of hand: the 10th has only turned once since the start of the universe, and after that they are all basically useless for thinking about anything but cosmological timelines. The last one here turns once every 95 petayears.

Remarkably, the BEC machine is still just getting started here. 95 Pa is nothing compared to the last wheel, which would require more energy than exists in the universe to turn. Think about that.

I want one of these

Apparently the BEC machine was inspired by a Daniel de Bruin creation:

Each wheel here is a 100:10 reduction. You’d only need the first 20 of them to have the last one do one single revolution since the birth of the solar system!

If someone would like to build such a geological clock for me, I’ll pay a sub-googol amount of money for it. Bonus points if it fits in a wristwatch.

Geoscientist, challenge thyself

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No costume is required for solving geocomputing kata

No costume is required for solving geocomputing kata

One of the highlights of my year is the Advent of Code, a sort of advent calendar for nerds. Its creator, Eric Wastl (hear his story), releases a new puzzle every day from the 1st of the month up to Christmas day. And the productivity of the global developer community goes down 74%.

Ever since the first one I tried, I’ve been wondering what geological coding challenges might look like. And now, 18 months later… well, I still don’t know, but I’ve made some anyway!

Puzzle number 1 (or 0)

Here’s how the first one starts:

You have a string of lithology codes, reading from the bottom up of a geological section. There is a sample every metre. There are three lithologies:

  • Mudstone
  • Fine sandstone or siltstone
  • Sandstone

The strings look like this:

    ...MFFSSFSSSS...

Your data, when you receive it, will be much longer than this.

We need to get some geological information from this string of codes. Specifically, you need to answer 3 questions:

  1. What is the total thickess in metres of sandstone (S)? Each sample represents one metre.
  2. How many sandstone beds are there? A bed is a contiguous group of one lithology, so MMFFF is 2 beds, one of M and one of F.
  3. How many times does the most common upwards bed transition occur? Do not include transitions from a lithology to itself.

You can download your own personal dataset, which in this case has 20,000 lithology codes. Then you can try to answer the questions, one at a time. You can use any programming language — indeed, any method at all — to solve the problems, you give an answer back to the server, and it will tell you if you are correct or not.

There are, as of right now, five ‘chapters’, covering topics from naming rock samples to combining map layers. You will receive the name of the next chapter when you correctly answer the final question of the three or four in each challenge.

If you’d like to give it a try, there’s a live starter Jupyter notebook here:

https://ageo.co/kata-live

Or, if you prefer, there’s a static notebook at https://ageo.co/kata, or you can dive directly into the web API for the first challenge: https://kata.geosci.ai/challenge/sequence

Do let us know how you get on!

The hacks are back

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We ran the first geoscience hackathon over 7 years ago in Houston. Since then we’ve hosted another 26 subsurface hackathons — that’s 175 projects, and over 900 hackers. Last year, 10 of the 11 hackathons that Agile* facilitated were in-house.

This is exciting. It means that grass-roots, creative, high-speed collaboration and technology development is possible inside large corporations. But it came at the cost of reducing our public events… and we want to bring the hackathon experience to everyone!

So this year, as well as helping execute a dozen or so in-house hackathons, we’ll be running and supporting more public hackathons too. So if you’ve been waiting for a chance to learn to code or try a social coding event, or just hang out with a lot of nerdy geoscientists and engineers — here’s your chance!

May: Geothermal Hackathon

The first event of the year is a new one for us. We’ll be at the World Geothermal Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the last week of April. The second weekend, 2 and 3 May, we’ll be running a hackathon on machine learning for geothermal subsurface applications. Iceland is only a short flight from the rest of Europe and many places in North America, so if you fancy something completely different, this is for you! Find out more and sign up.

[An earlier version of this post had the event on the previous weekend.]

June: Subsurface Hackathon (USA)

We’re back in Houston in June! The AAPG ACE is there — clashing with EAGE unfortunately — and we’ll be holding a (completely unrelated) hackathon on the weekend before: 5 to 7 June. Enthought is hosting the event in their beautiful new Houston digs, and Dell EMC is there too as a major sponsor. The theme is Tools… It’s going to be a big one! Find out more and sign up.

We are running two public Python classes before this event. Check them out.

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June: Amstel Hack (Europe)

The brilliant Filippo Broggini (ETHZ) is running a European hackathon again this year, again right before EAGE — and therefore the same weekend as the Houston event: 6 and 7 June. The event is being hosted at Shell’s Technology Centre in Amsterdam, and is guaranteed to be awesome. If you’re going to EAGE, it’s a no-brainer. Find out more and sign up.

We are also running a public Python class before this event. Check it out.

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That’s it for now… I hope you can come to one of these events. If you’re just starting out on your technology journey, have no fear — these events are friendly and welcoming. If you can’t make any of them, don’t worry: there will be more in the autumn, so stay tuned. Or, if you want help making one happen at your company, get in touch.

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This post is the key to the presents

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It’s that time when we celebrate the end of the old year and the beginning of a new one with delicious edibles and the exchange of gifts. So here we are again with what to get the most significant geologist (or geologist-to-be) in your life for Christmas. (It’s the 10th edition! Amazing. And I’m going to keep it up until someone gets the hint about the Triceratops skull.)

Rock chips and dip

Want to get a compass but don’t know where to turn? I did some research for you and learned something in the process: compasses can be super-expensive. So decide on your budget, then try these on for size:

The famous COCLA compass from Breithaupt.

The famous COCLA compass from Breithaupt.

  • The Breithaupt Stratum compass, aka COCLA (right), is the compass sans pareil… but it costs USD1500. Breithaupt make lots of other awesome geological toys, including several other compasses.

  • The Brunton Axis Pocket Transit is a classic compass and tries to make it easier to measure dip and azimuth. It’s up there in price though: over USD 700.

  • A couple of German companies make more affordable units: Krantz makes all sorts of stuff for geologists, including the Geologists Compass, and Kasper & Richter make the Meridian Pro, a USD 180 compass.

  • The Chinese manufacturer Harbin makes a very good compass, the DQL-8, which you should find under USD 100.

  • The Silva Expedition S and Suunto MC-2 NH both feature a clinometer and cost under USD 100.

Cool stuff

A Burmeister block, a Groove bag, a Scott Huebner burl wood sculpture, and some awesome field boots.

A Burmeister block, a Groove bag, a Scott Huebner burl wood sculpture, and some awesome field boots.

Games

It’s the time of year for board games. But you don’t want to be stuck with yet another game of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit. Get some geological games instead! Sticking with the structural geology theme, let’s start with the eartquake-related games. They all focus on the Bay Area of California. In 1906 San Francisco and Aftershock (due out any day now), you must rebuild the great city, hampered by cashflow and… aftershocks! There’s also an Age of Steam expansion board for the San Andreas Fault, if you’re into that.

earthquake_games.png

If volcanos are more your thing, there are lots more to choose from… On the theme of volcanos you have Fuji, which looks beautifully designed, as well as Taluva, Haleakala, and Triassic Terror, which also involves dinosaurs, so...

volcano_games.png

Books

All these new-in-2019 books have lots of pictures, which is my main prerequisite for a book.

books_for_2019.png

That’s all I have. Best of luck finding something for that special rockologist. Don’t panic — geologists are actually really easy to please. Most of them will be happy with a pair of dry socks, some coloured pencils, a new bobble hat, or a cold bottle of beer. If you find anything extra-special while you’re out shopping, please share it in the comments!

Unlike most images on agilescientific.com, the ones in this post are not my property and are not open access. They are the copyright of their respective owners, and I’m using them here in accordance with typical Fair Use terms. If owners object, please let me know.

Advice for a new hacker

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So you’ve signed up for a hackathon — or maybe you’ve seen an event and you’re still thinking about it.

First thing: I can almost guarantee that you will not regret it, so if you haven’t committed yet, I challenge you to go and sign up now.

But even once you’ve chosen to go, maybe you feel nervous about your skills, or are worried about spending two days with strangers, or aren’t sure about the idea of competitive coding. Someone asked me recently how to prepare — technically and mentally — for the event.

I should say that I’ve only participated in a couple of hackathons, so I definitely don’t know everything there is to know. But I have organized more than 20 hackathons, and helped people skill up for them and (I hope!) enjoy them. Here are the top 10-ish things you can to do to get the most out of the event:

  1. Brush up on your coding. Before the event, find out a bit about what kinds of projects are in the offing. If it’s a machine learning theme, brush up on your data science. Maybe image processing or text processing will be needed. Data management skills and database manipulation are always appreciated. Familiarty with a cloud environment, e.g. AWS, will help.

  2. Find a friend. Either take someone with you, or find a friendly face when you get there. It’s 100% possible to navigate the experience on your own, but much more fun with a partner.

  3. Dive in. You get out of the event what you put in. It’s like most learning experiences. You need an open mind, an enthusiastic demeanour, and a can-do attitude.

  4. Contribute. There’s never enough time, so you are a much-needed part of your team, but unless there’s a strong effort to coordinate the project, it’ll be a bit unstructured. You’ll have to take the initiative on things.

  5. Use a kanban. To help team members see the big picture and select tasks for themselves, put them on stickies on a nearby board. Make 3 areas: ‘to do’, ‘in progress’ and ‘done’. The goal is to move them from left to right.

  6. Ask for help. Every event Agile runs has non-hackers around to help out with stuff — anything from dietary needs to datasets to coding advice. Don’t get stuck on something, find someone to help you.

  7. Take breaks. You and your team should go for a short walk every 90 minutes or so. Relax a bit, but also get caught up: get progress reports from everyone, re-evaluate the goals, identify issues. You will find more clarity away from your keyboards.

  8. Work backwards from the demo. A good strategy is to outline what would make a killer demo of the project you have selected. Include at least one “Wow” feature if at all possible. Then work out what you need to either fake or build to make that demo. Build what you can, fake the rest.

  9. Check in with the other teams. This might not fly at highly competitive events, but at more casual affairs or if everyone is working on different projects, try chatting to some other teams, especially during breaks.

  10. Label your equipment. Hackathons are pretty chaotic, and although 99.9% of hackers are awesome, it’s still a roomful of strangers, so label the gear you care about. And of course keep your phone and computer locked.

  11. Reciprocate. Almost all these bits of advice have corollaries: be friendly and welcoming, accept contributions from others, give help if asked, and so on. Hackathons are social events as much as technical ones — enjoy meeting and collaborating with others.

If you have signed up for an event — I hope you love it! Do let us know how you get along. Or, if you’ve already been to a hackathon and have some advice to share — leave a comment below.

If you’re looking for an event to go to and you’re in western Europe — here’s one! It’s the FORCE Machine Learning Hackathon in Stavanger, Norway. I recently wrote about it — check it out.

If you’re looking for subsurface or geoscience project ideas, then I have a lot of reading for you. Check out the long list of hackathons reports on this blog. You can also dive into the Software Underground Slack to discuss project ideas there.