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TRANSFORM 2020 started and ended as a hackathon, with a virtual conference sandwiched in between. It became the beating heart of the entire TRANSFORM event, bringing people together around ambitious digital subsurface projects. One participant said on day 1: “It’s easier to connect meaningfully with people here than at a live conference.”

Previous hackathon have lasted a weekend but this one took over two weekends and, for some teams, every day in between. So there was plenty of time to get stuck in, and teams with people in far-flung timezones were able to work almost around the clock. It made for an intense 9 days.

The first batch of projects are listed below. To find out more about a project, get in touch with its champion, or visit its channel, in the Software Underground Slack. The channels all start with #t20- so, for example, the segysak channel is #t20-segysak.

52-things

Matteo Niccoli coordinated Dan Austin, Matt Hall, and 1 or 2 others around the 52 Things You Should Know About Geocomputing book project. This long-term project got a much-needed boost and is now ready to go to the next stage. (And there is still time to help if you are interested!) — Repo.

“Calculation of the distance between objects in a photograph has been around since the mid-19th century —nearly as long as modern photography itself. Digital photogrammetry, or structure-from-motion, is the modern equivalent: a technique that can reconstruct, in detail, the relative location of millions of features...”

— Adam Cawood & Clare Bond

welliovoz

Justin Gosses has been hacking on a JavaScript well-data viewer for a while, and it has now reached a good level of functionality. Nathan Jones, Lorenzo Perozzi and Nikita helped out, along with 3 or 4 others. Repo.

gostin

Dieter Werthmüller led the ‘geo open-source tie-in’ project, to form an umbrella for non-seismic ideas using the GemPy–Fatiando–SimPeg—PyGIMLi universe, along with PyVista and some other projects. This incredibly active team involved at least 20 or so people; get get the lowdown from this document. Repo.

segysak

Tony Hallam coordinated an effort to wrap segyio with xarray, resulting in the SEG-Y Swiss Army Knife (segysak). This was one of the most active projects during Transform, and the team, which included Steve Purves, Gijs Straathof, Fabio Contreras, and Alessandro Amato del Monte, got a lot done. If you use seismic data in Python, you need this! Repo.

_examples_notebooks_example_amplitude_extraction_displays_36_0.png

DASH WELL VIZ

Doug McClymont made a great start on a framework for a well-log web app, with tons of activity from a large team including Kent Inverarity (creator of lasio), Michael Harty, Behrooz Bashokooh, Julio Rodriguez, Wesley Banfield, Brian Burnham, and Kieran Blacker. Repo. Check out the app.

Bruges Geomech

Friso Brouwer and Alessandro Amato del Monte, along with several others, made some good progress on adding geomechanics functionality (Zobackogram, anyone?) to the bruges library. Repo (will be added to the main bruges repo soon).

And that’s only half of the projects! More soon, stay tuned.

UPDATE: Read Part 2 of this post.

Many thanks to our sponsors for their generous support of this event

We did it! Surrounded by sawdust from the recent incorporation of the Software Underground as a non-profit, we emerged from the wreckage of the Covid-cancelled hackathons in Amsterdam and Houston. Not just alive, but full of vigour and hope for the new world of online scientific events. And everything — well, almost everything — worked out.

Before saying anything more, a huge Thank You to our sponsors for making our events possible. And a special mention for DELL Technologies, who have been an unflinching supporter of the Software Underground and Agile’s community events for years.

The audacious plan

Initially, our purpose was to move the cancelled hackathons online. So from 6 June to 14 June, Filippo Broggini and others hosted a 9-day hackathon. This worked so fantastically well that I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it was the most successful subsurface hackathon ever. But I’ll leave Filippo to tell you all about it in the coming days.

Our next thought was, “Let’s help people skill up and add some tutorials.” So Brendon Hall, Rob Leckenby and I hosted 14 completely free and fully interactive two- to three-hour tutorials during the week. All of these streamed direct to YouTube and will stay there forever (see links below).

Then we added two group-participation unsessions — one on geoscience careers, and one on open source tools — and two sets of lightning talks from anyone who wanted to give one. All of this while several of the hackathon projects were still in full swing. It was a hectic week!

The tutorials

Fair warning: there is about 37 hours of first-rate instruction in digital earth science here. The first two are totally approachable for beginners, (and there's no shortage of people in the Software Underground who can help you get started!) so there's truly something for everyone.

Getting started with Python — Robert Leckenby — Video — Repo
Using Python subsurface tools — Thomas Martin — Video — Repo
Open-source spatial data analytics with GeostatsPy — Michael Pyrcz — Video — Repo
Geological modeling with GemPy — Miguel de la Varga — Video — Repo
Digital subsurface data loaders — Jørgen Kvalsvik — Video — Repo
Geophysical Inversion in SimPEG — Lindsey Heagy — Video — Repo
Geologic image processing with Python — Joe Kington — Video — Repo
Intro to interactive visualization in Jupyter for well data — Ashley Russell — Video — Repo
Geophysical modeling with Devito — Rhodri Nelson — Video — Repo
From scattered data to gridded products using Verde — Leonardo Uieda — Video — Repo
Scalable and resilient systems architecture — Liz Dennett — Video — Repo
Scalable model training with Ray Tune — Steve Purves — Video — Repo
Geospatial analysis in Python — Martin Bentley — Video — Repo
Idea to MVP (web apps for scientists) — Matt Hall & Brendon Hall — Video — Repo
On-demand seismic processing with AWS — Constantine Vavourak — Video — Repo

A huge Thank You to all of the instrutors, who not only gave freely of their time and insight, but also are all using open code and open data. No paywalls here!

Lightning talks

I'm so glad we added these 24 five-minute talks to the schedule. It was no trouble filling them — people signed themselves up. Every single talk was enlightening in some way, and these sessions were both really fun to be in. Thank you to everyone who took part!

Here's Andrea Balza Morales talking about the GeoLatinas Coding Group, which meets on Zoom twice a week:

The unsessions

An 'unsession' is a scientific meeting session, but without talks. Instead, we have a group discussion — but not the painful sort where you pass a mic around. We have a discussion that involves every scientist in the room. Since holding the first geoscience 'unsession' at CSEG in 2013, we've continued to evolve and adapt the methodology, but Monday was the first time I've tried to do one online.

I'll write more about these unsessions in the coming days, but here's a high-level description of what happened:

Unsession 1: What is good career advice in 2020? Around 95 people showed up to the start of this conversation about jobs and skills. We shared our career paths so far, and groups chatted about the best — and worst! — job-related advice they'd received. Finally we identified and ranked ideas for tools the Software Underground could build to help us all help each other find work we love.
Unsession 2: What open tools are needed now? The second session had around 55 people in conversation around open source tools. We talked about our favourite pieces of software, and what subsurface-flavoured versions might look like. And we heard how 4 current projects are trying to fill gaps in our current workflows, for example in seismic data management, and between geological models and GIS.

Here's where participants in the unsessions on Monday (blue) and Tuesday (red) were located:

On Wednesday we cleared our schedule in support of the #ShutDownSTEM and #strike4blacklives activism. We did this to help shine a light on the fact that black and racialized people everywhere are systematically disadvantaged in academia, industry, government, and all avenues in which STEM is practiced. In place of our schedule,we individually used the day to educate ourselves and listen to black voices in STEM. We must do better.

If you have not already done so, I urge you to read and sign this petition, which seeks to directly address the diversity problem we face today in geoscience.

If you took part in Transform 2020 — we thank you for your participation, and hope you learned something and will tell your friends and return next time.

We’ll write more soon about Transform 2020, which I hope and believe will have ramifications for how this community collaborates in the future. So stay tuned for that.

The TRANSFORM 2020 hackathon, Part 1