Prompted by Michael Fogleman's tweet that he'd like to see a bunch of us Emacs geeks get together in one room for a hackathon, Nic Ferrier and I tried out a casual Emacs hangout. Tinychat didn't work, but Google Hangouts worked fine. A bunch of people saw our tweets about it too and dropped by, yay! Here are some things we talked about (mostly nifty tweaks from Nic):

• shadchen is great for pattern matching, especially within trees
• Alec wanted to know about Emacs and Git, so Nic demonstrated basic Magit
• after-init-hook – load things there instead of in your ~/.emacs.d/init.el, so that your init.el does not break and you can test things easily from within Emacs
• I shared isearch-describe-bindings, which had a number of goodies that I hadn't known about before
• Recognizing the opportunity to share what you're working on (ex: nicferrier's working on an Emacs Lisp to Javascript compiler)

Google Hangouts screensharing worked well for us, giving multiple people the opportunity to share their screen and allowing people to choose what they wanted to focus on. Nic also started up a tmux session and a repository of public keys, but that's a bit more involved and requires more trust/coordination, so screen-sharing will likely be the way to go unless people have more of a pairing thing set up. This kind of informal hangout might be a good way for people to share what they're working on just in case other people want to drop by and help out or ask questions (which people can optionally answer, or postpone if they want to stay focused on their work). Something a little more focused than this might be to pick one bug or task and work on it together, maybe starting with a “ridealong” (one person screenshares, thinking out loud as he or she works, and taking the occasional question) and moving towards full pairing (people working on things together). Some of my short-term Emacs goals are:

• Improve my web development workflow and environment (including getting the hang of Magit, Smart Parens, Skewer, AutoComplete / Company Mode, and other good things)
• Learn how to write proper tests for Emacs-related things
• Get back into contributing to the Emacs community, perhaps starting to work on code/tests
• Look up my Org agenda on my phone, probably with Org Mobile or some kind of batch process

Let's give this a try. =) I set up a public calendar and added an event on Nov 5, 9-11PM Toronto time. If folks want to drop by, we'll see how that works out!