Today was the AAS Hack Together Day, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and by the Moore Foundation, both of which have been very supportive of the research I have done, and both of which are thinking outside the box about how we raise the next generation of scientists! We had a huge group and lots happened. If you want to get a sense of the range and scope of the projects, look at these telegraphic wrap-up slides, which (as always) only paint a partial picture!
We were very fortunate to have Huppenkothen (UW) in the room, and in (literally) five minutes before we started, she put together these slides about hack days. I love that! I think Huppenkothen is the world ambassador and chief philosopher of hacking.
I worked on two hacks. Well really one. The one I didn't really work on was to launch a Mastodon instance. Mastodon is the open-source alternative to Twitter(tm) and has nice features like content warnings (on which you can filter) and community-governable rules and restrictions. I thought it might be fun to try to compete with the big players in social! Although I didn't work on it at all, Dino Bektešević (UW) took over the project and (with a lot of hacking) got it up and running on an AWS instance. It took some hacking because (like many open-source projects) the documentation and tutorials were out of date and filled with version (and other) inconsistencies. But Bektešević (and I by extension) learned a lot!
The hack I actually did (a very tiny, tiny bit of) work on was to write a stellar-binaries-themed science white paper for the Decadal Survey. Katie Breivik (CITA) and Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) are leading it. Get in touch with us if you want to help! The point is: Binary stars are a critical part of every science theme for the next decade.
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