Hilmar Lapp¹, Sendu Bala², James P. Balhoff¹, Amy Bouck^3,20, Naohisa Goto⁴, Mark Holder⁵, Richard Holland⁶, Alisha Holloway⁷, Toshiaki Katayama⁸, Paul O. Lewis⁹, Aaron J. Mackey¹⁰, Brian I. Osborne¹¹, William H. Piel¹², Sergei L. Kosakovsky Pond¹³, Art F.Y. Poon¹³, Wei-Gang Qiu¹⁴, Jason E. Stajich¹⁵, Arlin Stoltzfus¹⁶, Tobias Thierer¹⁷, Albert J. Vilella⁶, Rutger A. Vos¹⁸, Christian M. Zmasek¹⁹, Derrick J. Zwickl¹ and Todd J. Vision^1,3

¹National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, 2024 W. Main St., Suite A200, Durham NC 27705, U.S.A. ²Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, Medical Research Council, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 0XY, United Kingdom. ³Department of Biology, CB 3280, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. ⁴Genome Information Research Center, Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, Osaka University, 3-1 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan. ⁵School of Computational Science, 150-F Dirac Science Library, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4120, U.S.A. ⁶EMBL—European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, United Kingdom. ⁷Section of Evolution and Ecology, Center for Population Biology, 3347 Storer Hall, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A. ⁸Human Genome Center, Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Shirokanedai, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0071, Japan. ⁹Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, 75 North Eagleville Road, Unit 3043, Storrs, CT 06269-3043, U.S.A. ¹⁰GlaxoSmithKline, 1250 S. Collegeville Road, Collegeville, PA 19426, U.S.A. ¹¹ZBio LLC, Nyack, NY 10960, U.S.A. ¹²Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, 170 Whitney Ave., New Haven CT 06511, U.S.A. ¹³University of California, San Diego, Division of Comparative Pathology and Antiviral Research Center, 150 West Washington Street, San Diego, CA 92103. ¹⁴Department of Biological Sciences, Hunter College, City University of New York, 695 Park Ave, New York, NY 10021, U.S.A. ¹⁵Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. ¹⁶Biochemical Science Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 100 Bureau Drive, Mail Stop 8310, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899-8310. ¹⁷Biomatters Ltd, Level 6, 220 Queen St, Auckland, New Zealand. ¹⁸Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, #2370-6270 University Blvd., Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4, Canada. ¹⁹Burnham Institute for Medical Research, La Jolla, CA 92037, U.S.A. ²⁰Department of Biology, Duke University, P.O. Box 90338, Durham, NC 27708, U.S.A.

Abstract:

In December, 2006, a group of 26 software developers from some of the most widely used life science programming toolkits and phylogenetic software projects converged on Durham, North Carolina, for a Phyloinformatics Hackathon, an intense five-day collaborative software coding event sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). The goal was to help researchers to integrate multiple phylogenetic software tools into automated workflows. Participants addressed deficiencies in interoperability between programs by implementing “glue code” and improving support for phylogenetic data exchange standards (particularly NEXUS) across the toolkits. The work was guided by use-cases compiled in advance by both developers and users, and the code was documented as it was developed. The resulting software is freely available for both users and developers through incorporation into the distributions of several widely-used open-source toolkits. We explain the motivation for the hackathon, how it was organized, and discuss some of the outcomes and lessons learned. We conclude that hackathons are an effective mode of solving problems in software interoperability and usability, and are underutilized in scientific software development.