We are excited to announce the Snakemake Hackathon 2027, to be held 8-12 March, 2027 at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland. This event will bring together passionate developers and data scientists to collaborate on and innovate with the Snakemake workflow management system. We plan to fix issues, improve usability, implement new features and plugins, and advance Snakemake’s ecosystem of tool wrappers and workflows, across all scientific domains.
Registrations are accepted now, see below.
Organizers
- Johannes Köster (University of Duisburg-Essen, Snakemake lead developer)
- Lukas Heinrich (TU Munich)
- Christian Meesters (University of Frankfurt Snakemake core developer)
- Clemens Lange (Paul Scherrer Institute, Host)
- Aliya Nigamova (Paul Scherrer Institute, Host)
- Matthew Feickert (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- David Lähnemann (University of Duisburg-Essen, Snakemake core developer)
About Snakemake
The Snakemake workflow management system is a powerful tool designed for creating reproducible and scalable data analyses. Utilizing a human-readable, Python-based language, Snakemake makes it easy to create new and update existing analysis workflows. With its careful design choices—like the plugin system for extending functionality—it can seamlessly scale workflow deployment from a laptop to servers, clusters, grids, and cloud environments; all without modifying the workflow definitions, and while automating deployment of required software. As a final workflow output, Snakemake generates interactive visual reports that encapsulate results and data provenance, and can easily be shared with collaborators.
With over two million downloads on Bioconda, and averaging >14 new citations per week in 2025, Snakemake has established itself as a gold standard for reproducible data science, underpinning numerous high-impact publications across different scientific disciplines.
Hackathon goals
The hackathon will focus on improvements in several key areas, including:
- documentation (for all the following points)
- core code
- plugins (extending core functionality)
- wrappers (standardized copy-pastable rules / analysis steps)
- workflow creation and maintenance (documentation, tooling)
Participants will do so, by:
- identifying gaps and weaknesses in documentation
- prioritizing existing bug reports and feature requests
- conceptualizing new features
- creating pull requests for existing or newly created issues
The hackathon will be complemented by short introductory lectures for the different relevant parts of the codebase.
Participation
Participants should be able to program with Python and ideally (but not necessarily) already have some experience with contributing to the Snakemake ecosystem. We do not care about scientific or industrial background.
The workspace is large enough for 40 participants. In case the number of applicants exceeds our capacity, we will rank registered people by their experience and motivation as outlined in the registration form.
Venue
Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland
Forschungsstrasse 111
5232 Villigen PSI
Accommodation
Please book your own accommodation. Recommended hotels:
https://www.psi.ch/en/guesthouse/nearby-hotels
Also, we will reserve a few rooms in the PSI guest house. More information to follow.