ITK’s 14th Anniversary Celebration Hackathon

On November 6th, we celebrated the 14th anniversary of the first meeting that marked the beginning of the Insight Toolkit (ITK). The event gathered community members in Kitware’s office in Clifton Park, NY and around the world through a Google+ Hangout organized at the ITK Bar Camp G+ Community. Participants followed instructions to help address defects identified through Coverity and CppCheck static analysis.

The event was very successful.  By the afternoon, we had submitted thirty four patches for code review, most of which addressed multiple issues.  Coverity static analysis is a new quality tool for the project. It found some false positives, some trivial issues, but also many subtle bugs that would be hard to otherwise identify. The trace and analysis interface provided in its web interface is powerful, although some connectivity issues arose. In the afternoon, we reviewed the new patches together.

Overall, it was a productive, enjoyable event as we collaborated and learned from each other. It was also a good opportunity to hear good stories from the old timers, like Bill Lorensen.  For example, Bill remarked on the time Alex Stephanoff gave a presentation on the STL to an audience and boasted about the correctness of the code, only to have Donald Knuth point out a bug in the slide’s code.  Or, the time he repeatedly crashed the Cray supercomputer in Minnesota by making some assumptions on the bytesize of short ints.

Luis Ibanez (right) smiles as Bill Lorensen (left) reminds him that winter is coming.

Bugs of all types were squashed!

Brian Helba (left) reflects on the joys of C++.

Coverity Static Analysis

Many new patches!