If you follow GNU Radio at all, I'm sure you've heard about our Hackfests. This is where a lot of GNU Radio developers get together for a few days to a week at a time and hack out GNU Radio code. We've found these fantastic ways to improve the project as it gives us time to plan, discuss specific topics, hang out and get to know each other, and code code code! A large amount of the code making up GNU Radio has either come directly from or been inspired by these events.
Mostly, we've done these in the US. Ettus Research has been a fantastic host to a number of our hackfests as has Virginia Tech. Just recently, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology hosted a mini hackfest right after the WSR and a full hackfest a few months later. These were our first events held in Europe, and though I personally missed the second one, the post-WSR hackfest was great fun and hugely successful.
Following up on this, I wanted to announce and give a pre-emptive thanks to TU Delft in the Netherlands who has agreed to host a hackfest early next year! The plan is to hold the hackfest on TU Delft campus during the last week of January so that we can go straight from Delft to Brussels for FOSDEM that weekend (partly assuming that we have an SDR dev room at FOSDEM again this year). I think having these two events back-to-back is, pardon the Irish, going to be great craic.
Want to come to the hackfest? We certainly don't want to discourage anyone, but I also want to point out that the hackfests are usually smallish affairs of 10 to 20 developers, usually people heavily involved in either writing or using GNU Radio regularly. So the facilities are on the small side to fit us, and you're on your own for housing, food, transportation, etc. But, if this is something that excites you and you can make it to Delft, please let me know if you'd like to come. Just shoot me an email. And if you don't know my email address, then you probably haven't been using GNU Radio that much :p