FreeCAD News

This year again, the FPA orga­nized a FreeCAD day and a hackathon (and much more!) togeth­er with FOSDEM, in Brus­sels. We had an incred­i­ble, epic week of events (which you’ll know all about lat­er on this blog). I’ll describe here briefly what hap­pened dur­ing the hackathon and the FreeCAD day.

The hackathon

The hackathon took place dur­ing 3 days at the Brus­sels hack­er­space which tra­di­tion­al­ly offers the space to projects dur­ing the week before FOSDEM (and also orga­nizes a kick-ass par­ty dur­ing FOSDEM, which many FreeCADers less old and aso­cial than me attended 😉 ).

Vis­it­ing the Brus­sels hack­er­space is in itself a near-video-game expe­ri­ence, involv­ing find­ing your way in a derelict build­ing with long, sim­i­lar cor­ri­dors every­where, codes on doors and dan­ger­ous mis­sions, like help­ing the hack­er­space peo­ple to car­ry dozens of crates of Club Mate through pitch-black base­ment mazes, fail­ing lifts, and rooms pro­tect­ed by smoke machines. Luck­i­ly no zom­bie horde came.

After a cold start (lit­er­al­ly, as we had a hard time kick-start­ing the wood stove) the first day, more and more peo­ple began to arrive, many com­ing there direct­ly from their train/plane. Soon we reached our full capac­i­ty (about 20 peo­ple). The hackathon is a won­der­ful time to look at what every­body else is doing, final­ly stop­ping to dis­cuss that par­tic­u­lar idea with that spe­cif­ic per­son, chat with peo­ple you only knew online, launch wild ideas and imme­di­ate­ly find inter­est­ed peo­ple to work on it with you.

Some FreeCAD heroes like @chennes, @adrianinsaval or @paddle even man­aged to actu­al­ly code and get an impres­sive amount of work done 😉

All in all, we had a lot of fun and, above all, there was there a team who shares a same pas­sion for FreeCAD mak­ing it hap­pen togeth­er. For me, this is also a kind of guar­an­tee that what hap­pens online, which can some­times be unclear or veiled, is true and alive. We all share a sim­i­lar vision over the project, we all want it to become bet­ter, more pow­er­ful, more universal.

The FreeCAD day

The FreeCAD day is a day open to every­one, where peo­ple can come, present an idea or a project they’re work­ing on, dis­cuss ideas or sim­ply watch what’s being pre­sent­ed. This year, we shared the space with KiCAD who also main­tained a room on their own. We also had a com­mon space for peo­ple from both projects to meet and inter­act (many peo­ple are in fact mem­bers of both communities).

Around 30 peo­ple attend­ed. The day unrolled smooth and nice­ly fol­low­ing the uncon­fer­ence idea: You want to talk about some­thing? You write it on a post-it note, and place it some­where on the sched­ule. Notes then get rearranged as the day unfolds.

Some of these took 5 min­utes, oth­er could last as long as 2 hours, like the com­plaints ses­sion, which was cer­tain­ly the epic moment of the day. Kli­ment from KiCAD orga­nized it mas­ter­ful­ly like last year (say your com­plaint in one sin­gle sen­tence, no com­ments or dis­cus­sions allowed), and we gained a wealth of good ideas, some easy to imple­ment, some com­plex, some new, some well-known, but this was in any case a tremen­dous­ly inter­est­ing and use­ful con­nec­tion moment with FreeCAD users (some­times our­selves, as many devel­op­ers put their user hats and also start­ed “com­plain­ing” 😉 ). All in all, I felt we were all on the same page there: FreeCAD is awe­some, but there is no rea­son why it can’t become more awesome!

Sev­er­al oth­er (often well-known) FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers pre­sent­ed the projects they’re work­ing on, and that also is an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty to see some of the inter­est­ing things FreeCAD is used for.

Thanks to all of you who came and par­tic­i­pat­ed. This day was an incred­i­ble and unique con­ver­gence around FreeCAD, and I believe each of us came out of it full of ideas and renewed enthusiasm.

See you next year?