.NET Summer Hackfest Update: Session 3 Underway!
.NET Summer Hackfest is a .NET Foundation sponsored, community run open source hacking party. We've got a series of three sessions, each two weeks long, and we've just finished the second session. You can read more about the overall event and how to get involved here.
Session 3 just kicked off this Monday with some great projects. If you've been waiting to get involved, this is the last session for .NET Summer Hackfest 2017, so now is the time!
Humanitarian Toolbox
Humanitarian Toolbox builds open source projects for humanitarian (e.g. disaster relief) organizations. They've got a great history of hosting .NET hack events and know how to build sustainable open source projects, so I'm thrilled to have them aboard!
This is a very mature project with an experienced team to help you get up to speed with contributing to a .NET open source project, so if you're new to .NET open source, this is a great way to get started. It's real software that's being used by the Red Cross to save lives. This is an amazing opportunity to use your programming abilities to do something really worthwhile while learning some cutting edge skills (they're running on .NET Core 2.0).
Here's a video from the project kickoff during the Humanitarian Toolbox Community Standup from this Tuesday:
And here's all you need to get started.
MvvmCross
MvvmCross is an MVVM framework for cross-platform solutions, including Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, Windows and Mac. We'll be converting it to .NET Standard and looking at documentation and up-for-grabs issues.
The MvvmCross has really put some work into planning this project out. Here's their information page overviewing their goals, how to get started, and their in-person events. Over 60 people have registered to participate in this hackfest project so far!
If you're near Amsterdam, register for the MvvmCross and Xamarin HackDay event on September 2. This looks like a great time, including some local speakers and some exciting special guests.
Here's the video from the team's HackFest Kickoff event which tells you everything you need to get started:
Akka.NET
Akka.NET is a port of the JVM Akka distributed actor framework and it supports a large range of capabilities, runtimes, and plugins. Akka.NET is used in everything from Xamarin apps to WPF to large-scale distributed systems running on top of Azure and Amazon. And they just joined the .NET Foundation. :-)
Akka.NET is used in a lot of high performance, mission critical installations, and they're doing some pretty advanced, high-performance stuff. This is a tremendous opportunity to work with a great team on some pretty advanced software.
Here's their overview page which tells you everything you need to get started.
ImageSharp
ImageSharp is a new, fully featured, fully managed, cross-platform, 2D graphics API designed to allow the processing of images without the use of System.Drawing. Using a modern, generic API that focuses on making common tasks easy to perform but gives you the tools for complex operations ImageSharp is a great alternarive and can be used in device, cloud, and embedded/IoT scenarios.
In my personal experience, working with imaging and graphics can be really fun, but it can also be pretty hard to learn on your own since you're working with some complex APIs. This is a great project to get going with graphics programming, as you'll be working with a very experienced team.