Our recent Codefest was quite exciting. Not only was it held in San Francisco – one of the global epicenters of cutting-edge software – it was at GitHub!!!! Since 2008 GitHub has changed how developers track, share, and collaborate on software. They have popularized “Social Coding” by adding a user interface with social network functions to Git, a command line source code management platform. Mega-popular with developers, including the ORCID team, GitHub is also known as one of the highest-valued Silicon Valley “Unicorn” companies.
Needless to say, there are few coders who wouldn’t be excited to walk through GitHub’s faux Oval Office and gaze upon GitHub’s Octocat – and we were equally thrilled to bring you there.
After listening to an inspiring opening keynote by Kaitlin Thaney from Mozilla Science Lab we kicked off the Codefest with introductions. The first day our 15 participants put in about seven hours of coding and collaborating (including time off to participate in bracketed duels with GitHub’s stock of Nerf pistols – a standard Silicon Valley troupe!). We’ve always encouraged people to ask questions about implementing integrations with ORCID during Codefest, and this year we added official office hours to make it even easier. These personal interactions are exciting for the ORCID development team as we can quickly get projects pointed in the right direction, gain insights into where we need to be clearer, and identify new features that make integration easier. I could list countless examples but two that stand out from this meeting are 1) helping integrators realize the importance of authenticated ORCID iDs compared with researcher supplied (typed-in) ORCID iDs, and 2) realizing we need to add a grouping iD lookup method for our new peer review API.
After all that hard work and fun, we wrapped up the day with a conference-wide reception provided by GitHub.
The next morning brought the usual rush to wrap-up projects. Everyone was heads down until right up to the 1pm deadline, at which point the teams left standing demoed their projects to the judges: Simeon Warner of Cornell University Library and ORCID’s Matthew Buys. The schedule was so tight I took to the stage to present the finished projects without even knowing who the winners would be!
We’ve captured the projects that successfully crossed the finish line in this slide deck. Top kudos and GitHub swag were awarded to the two winning teams:
- Marisa Strong and Scott Fisher – California Digital Library. For quickly pivoting requirements and producing a working prototype that utilizes ORCID’s authorization flow to verify an ORCID iD.
- Tom Demeranville – ORCID EU, Eric Thrasher – Academic Analytics, and Shobhit Tyagi – ORCID.org. For providing graphs that display metrics of ORCID’s growth.
Thanks to everyone who participated – and see you at our Codefests in 2016!
