Sprints, Hackathons and Codefests as community gluons in computational biology

Sprints, Hackathons and Codefests are all names used for informal software developer meetings, especially popular in open source communities. These meetings, along side more traditional conferences, are a vital part of the international network of interactions between software developers working in bioinformatics and computational biology, and complement purely online interactions such as project mailing lists, online chat, web forums and more recently voice and video calls. This paper lays out how the events are organised and presents an overview on their achievements.