This time we're taking a few minutes out of the TESS.ninja Sprint in NYC to talk with David Hogg about Hack/Sprint Weeks, the future of astronomy, and the upcoming Gaia Sprint in June.
Hogg traces these events back to .Astronomy, an "unconference" focused on Astronomy and the web. I attended "Dot Astro" 6 in Chicago in 2014, and it was an exciting meeting full of quickly made projects, long discussions, new ideas... For anyone in astronomy interested in how we communicate and interact on the web, I would honestly recommend attending a .Astro meeting!
I think these Hack/Sprint events are a major change for our field, which is why I continue to attend the AAS Hack Together Day, and these Sprints. Projects I typically work on are well thought out (i.e. leading directly to a paper/result), and can take months (or years!) to complete. Most importantly for me, these hack/sprint events provide a time and space to exercise a different mode of working on science: to speculate, experiment in new domains, learn quick, and fail fast.
As Hogg points out in the video below, for many meetings/conferences the "best" parts are the coffee breaks (or dinners, drinks, hallway chance encounters, etc). Science is a human endeavor, and when we spend the time and money to gather I believe we should maximize the human interaction.
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