We'll hold our next meeting at 7PM at Capital Factory (701 Brazos) on Wednesday, April 3rd.

Normally we'd hold one the week of March 18-22, but with SXSW in town and recent scheduling changes at Capital Factory, it makes more sense to just jump straight to April 3rd.

For anyone who's never been to Capital Factory, there's parking under the building itself (The Austin Centre) (for a fee). When you get inside the building, look for elevators to offices in the building (should be on the opposite side of the hotel lobby from where the parking garage elevators are). Take that elevator to the 16th floor (top floor). When you step off, you'll be "at" Capital Factory and should see signage as to where to go from there, or just ask for Nicholle. She runs the events there and can show you where we'll be.

• Mailing List (Google Groups)
• @openhackatx on Twitter

Please follow us on Twitter and/or subscribe to the mailing list for announcements and updates. We'll also generally try to keep this page updated at all times.

We have a little structure around our meetings to give people a chance to speak, bounce ideas off others, and "break the ice" for anyone who hasn't met before. We tried this during our first meeting and it went rather well, so we'll stick with it until folks tell us otherwise:

• 7:00PM Meet at CF
• 7:15PM Introductions (stand-up style)
• 7:30PM Hack
• 10:30PM "Bring it to the Tribe"

We'll begin with introductions at 7:15. Just say who you are, what you do and where you do it (if you want to), what languages/frameworks you work with, and anything else you want to share. This is just to let everybody get to know each other and see who does what so others can help/pair with them, or ask for help if you know something they don't.

Next is the hack session. This is what OpenHack is all about - slingin' code. That's 3 hours. You can pair up with somebody or work totally alone - it's totally up to you. We encourage you to pair just for the fun of it, but nobody's going to even -remotely- have a problem if you don't. I mean hey, we're hackers in ATX, there IS no chiller crowd anywhere :)

You can pair or solo hack on anything you want. Open source, closed source. Work. Play. Python. .NET. Ruby. PHP. Java. Scala. Erlang. Clojure. Haskell. Objective-C. C#. VB. Even brainfuck - it doesn't matter! Any skill level on anything on any project, it's all good as long as you're here to sling code.

Finally, we'll wrap up with a segment that, for lack of a better term, we'll call "bring it to the tribe". The idea is that as a community of developers, engineers and computer scientists, we're a "tribe" of sorts. So we need to help each other out. OpenHack - for us anyway - isn't just about the code, but also about the people who write it! So we want to leverage the collective widsom of our "tribe" to help each other. This small wrap-up is designed to give people a chance to present a problem they may be having (code related) to the group. Things like, "I can't seem to grasp rspec's DSL, can anybody recommend a good book or resource", or "does anyone have any tips on how to convince my boss to let me re-implement this crufty old system written in outdated perl scripts as a REST-based SOA since it would be just so much cleaner?". Things like that are what the tribe session is meant for, and we want to provide an open, official forum for members to ask each other for help in their present challenge. Maybe some one has experience, a book, or a contact who can help you out. This gives each of us a chance to leverage the group's "tribal knowledge" to solve a problem.

We'll wrap up between 10:30 and 11PM.

Our venue, Capital Factory, has been great to work with. After our fist several meetings, they've set us up with a recurring schedule of every first Wednesday of the month and third Tuesday of the month. We'll continue to announce meetings via the mailing list, Twitter, and here, but for now that's the general schedule.

If you're looking for other options (maybe certain days don't work for you), there's Cafe Bedouins. They generally meet every Tuesday at a coffee shop or other similar location at 7PM. It's not as structured as above, but it's another option for you to get in on as well.

There's also a Meetup.com group we've been made aware of that may interest you, called the Austin Pair Programming Circle. While fairly new, they appear to be meeting weekly at the Opa Coffee and Wine Bar on South Lamar.

We're interested in a diversity of sponsors. If your company is interested in sponsoring OpenHack, please let us know via Twitter or the mailing list, or in person at a meeting.

Our first several meetings have been sponsored by the fine folks at Engine Yard and GitHub.

Engine Yard is a Platform as a Service vendor currently supporting PHP, Ruby and Node.js applications. Forget your devops and just hand them the code, and they've got it from there. However you can still exercise a huge amount of control and customization should you want it.

Most of the open source community is already familiar with GitHub; they are the world's leading git source repository host. Account signups are very simple, tools for bug and feature tracking exist, and it works great for teams. Push your git repository to GitHub and manage your project easily.

If you'd like more information about either sponsor, please see J. Austin Hughey.

If your company would like to sponsor OpenHack Austin, please let us know. We'd like to run different sponsors at different meetings, preferrably where each sponsor compliments the other in some way and is of course useful to those who attend OpenHack. So if you're interested in sponsorship, please let me (J. Austin Hughey) know (give me a shout on Twitter or something). Sponsorship just consists of pizza and sodas (no alcohol) for the group, and we make your "swag" available to people who attend.

OpenHack is about the hacker/developer community. This group exists to give you a repeated/predictable opportunity to get out and among your peers, hack on a project, develop connections with people, and have fun while being productive. So if you have ideas on how we can further that goal, or have ideas on our proposed format, either tweet the organizers, J. Austin Hughey @jaustinhughey and Damon Clinkscales @damon, or post a message to the above mailing list.