Just before Christmas the Center for Systems Biology Dresden hosted the second de.NBI DAIS Hackathon for two weeks. Over 40 key developers from the international community met from the 3rd to the 16th of December to discuss and develop ImageJ, Fiji, and KNIME, and how these platforms interoperate. This also included fundamental work on underlying frameworks and common modules such as ImgLib2, SciJava, BioFormats, BigDataViewer, Scenery, or BoneJ. In numerous programing and discussion sessions, that also included additional online participants, the specialists strived for improving available open-source software tools for analyzing biological and bio-medical image data.
An additional benefit of such meetings is to bring the international community of experts closer together to avoid duplicated efforts and to foster synergizing on each others work. A bit of mulled wine from the Dresden “Striezelmarkt" surely helped for this aspect of the Hackathon’s agenda.
Curtis, one of the participants says, “It was again an incredible useful, exhausting, but at the same time satisfying time in this beautiful city. I am already looking forward to the next DAIS Hackathon in 2018!”.