Ocean Hack Week 2024
I attended Ocean Hack Week (24-30 August 2024) and had a great time!
A few weeks ago I attended Ocean Hack Week at the ANU Kioloa Campus in NSW.
Denisse Fierro and Nick Mortimer did a fantastic job of organising, and I really liked the format of working on projects interspersed with relevant tutorials. I chose a project based in the R shiny package, basically using the whole OHW as an excuse to teach myself shiny. I also liked the variety of activities that balanced the focus of the week (staring at computers) with beach walks and social activities.
Honestly, I was a little nervous about attending a “hack week” event. It seems like the sort of thing that only serious hardcore programmers attend, you know? But the vibe wasn’t like that at all. I was probably one of 2 or 3 people with advanced experience in R, and while others had more experience in Python it wasn’t a huge deal and we could still communicate at the same level about how to solve ocean-related problems. My only real criticism of the week is that there was a planned workshop that didn’t end up happening and it was the one I was most looking forward to - basically an introduction to machine learning in the context of ocean data. Oh well, maybe next time!
It’s a well-known fact among small-conference aficionados (like myself) that every organiser has their own “thing” - a pet activity that makes their conference just a little different. I’ve attended conferences where that “thing” has been wine tastings (highly recommend) or group runs at dawn (less good), but this time the activity was karaoke.
Nick brought a karaoke machine loaded with every song under the sun, so one highlight of my week was absolutely shredding my voice on Don’t Stop Believing and getting some laughs with a comedy rendition of What’s Going On.
But in between screaming my voice hoarse and picking up waaaaay too many shells on the beach, I did actually make some cool changes to a model comparison and selection tool for FishMIP and made some friends too. Looking forward to OHW2025!
