We are excited to announce the Snakemake Hackathon 2025, to be held March 10-14 2025 at the prestigious CERN IdeaSquare (Geneva, 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.
Besides the work, you can enjoy the beautiful Geneva, visit the exciting CERN exhibition and take a tour through the LHC!
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 one million downloads on Bioconda, and averaging >12 new citations per week in 2023, 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
Directions on how to get to CERN you can find here: https://home.cern/directions
When on CERN site, find your way to the car park behind the Globe. IdeaSquare is there, towards West (France). Google map is here.
