Organised by nf-core

Welcome

Please join us for the March 2022 nf-core hackathon! The theme for this hackathon will be Documentation. See below for details.

This event is entirely virtual (we will be back in gather.town!) and we are attempting to support people in all timezones

Topic: Documentation

The past twelve months have brought some major changes to the nf-core community, with the migration to Nextflow DSL2. The nf-core website and documentation is a crucial part of the community. In this hackathon, the focus will be all things documentation.

Generally speaking, tasks during the hackathon will typically involve going through tutorials, testing each command making sure they work, checking phrasing and descriptions to ensure they are clear.

Most nf-core documentation is written in Markdown. If you're not yet familiar with Markdown, please take a few minutes to work through this tutorial: https://www.markdowntutorial.com/

To keep things manageable, we will organise into the groups. You are free to change groups as you wish during the hackathon.

We will also have additional events during the hackathon. These will be a presentation on making pipeline-related graphics and a drop-in help desk for customising MultiQC reports. Please see below for more information.

We will coordinate our work and the issues we are working on using a single GitHub Project Board. There will be a separate tab for each Group where we have collated a list of relevant issues.

Group 1 - Pipeline documentation

💬 Slack group: hackathon-march2022-pipelines
😊 Group Leads: James Fellows Yates, Maxime Garcia
💻 HackMD

This group will focus on nf-core pipelines themselves. This is perfect for anyone already familiar with specific pipelines.

• Writing, updating and reviewing documentation for specific pipelines
• Improving descriptions of the output files generated and how to use them
• Adding more detailed parameter help
• Writing usage tutorials
• Constructing figures and diagrams (eg. pipeline overviews, output documentation)

Group 2 - DSL2 / modules documentation

💬 Slack group:hackathon-march2022-modules
😊 Group Leads: Harshil Patel, Edmund Miller, Gregor Sturm, Friederike Hanssen
💻 HackMD

The pace of development with DSL2 and nf-core/modules has been a little crazy over the past months. Now things are settling down, we need to bring the website documentation up to date with the current state of the tools.

• Reviewing and updating all general nf-core documentation to DSL2
• Writing new tutorials how to write DSL2 modules and pipelines

Group 3 - Training documentation: carpentries, tutorials

💬 Slack group: hackathon-march2022-training
😊 Group Leads: Gisela Gabernet, Mahesh Binzer-Panchal
💻 HackMD

There is an increasing amount of Nextflow and nf-core training material available. Tutorials and walkthroughs are perhaps some of the most important docs to keep up to date, as they are often the first thing that newcomers to the community are exposed to.

This is a good topic for newcomers to the community - you can run through tutorials and learn about Nextflow and nf-core, whilst keeping an eye out for things that are not clear or can be improved.

• Reviewing and updating existing Nextflow and nf-core training documentation
• Search and find more latest nextflow tutorials online

Group 4 - Website tasks, nf-core/tools package documentation

💬 Slack group: hackathon-march2022-tools
😊 Group Leads: Matthias Hörtenhuber, Phil Ewels
💻 HackMD

All that documentation has to go somewhere! This group will focus on restructuring and organising the documentation on the website to improve naviation and user-experience.

• Review and update documentation for nf-core/tools, configs and the website itself.
• Reviewing and updating how the nf-core/tools documentation is built and rendered.
• Build a better search mechanism for the website.
• Restructure website navigation and improve the user experience.
• Act in a support role for technical help to others in the hackathon.

Talks

We will also be offering two different additional events throughout the hackathon at 14:30 each day. These focus on useful 'soft skills' for developers that can enhance their documentation.

• 🖊 "Draw stuff good: how to use Inkscape & creating pipeline diagrams in Inkscape (like that fancy metro-map one)" presentation by James Fellows Yates
• 📊 "Pimp your MultiQC report" drop-in help desk hosted by Phil Ewels

Schedule

We expect people to come and go during the hackathon due to diverse time zones. Please just do whatever works best for you!

All locations described in the table below refer to places in the Hackathon gather.town space. EMEA stands for the time zones in Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

The following schedule should display times in your local time zone:

Social Activities

During the hackathon, we will have a few light-hearted fun and games!

• Once again we are running our nf-core bingo throughout the three days! See instructions how to play here.
• Breaks will happen in the dedicated Cafeteria room, for informal chatting and getting to know each other.
• Every day, at 3am and 3pm CET, there will be a new pipeline name to guess in our wordle-clone nf-cordle.
• Finally, during Thursday's social event (see schedule above), we will be running a short quiz!

All social activities are of course optional, but we hope to see as many people joining in as possible