SAOC 2025 Ends & DConf Planning is Underway

[Mike Parker]

## SAOC 2025

The final milestone of SAOC 2025 ended on January 14. Our three 
contributors sent in their final reports over the following week. 
The judges reviewed all of their work and deliberated which 
contributor would receive the final $1000 payment and a free trip 
to DConf '26.

The judges selected Mohamed El Shorbagy for his work on 
refactoring the compiler's AST nodes. This project is an early 
step toward enabling future enhancements to the compiler. Though 
SAOC is finished, the project is not, and he intends to continue 
with it. Congratulations, Mohamed!

Emmanuel Nyarko made major progress on whittling down the ImportC 
bug list, and Sourish Jana improved some of the compiler's error 
messages. This is a set of QoL improvements that will be 
noticeable to those who have been affected by ImportC issues and 
less-than-ideal error messages. Both Emmanuel and Sourish have 
indicated they intend to continue contributing.

To all three contributors: congratulations on pushing through to 
the end of the event, and thanks for all the work you put in. 
We're always in need of contributors, so extra thanks for 
planning to stick around!

## DConf '26

I'm not yet in a position to make the formal announcement about 
DConf '26, but the wheels are turning. We're definitely in 
London, and barring any major surprises, we will be back at 
CodeNode.

As for the dates, the best I can say now is that it's going to be 
either some time in August or the first week of September. We're 
aiming for the latter.

There's a major change to the schedule this year in that we're 
dropping the Hackathon. Hackathon attendance post-COVID has never 
been what it was pre-COVID, and has dwindled every year to the 
point that the expense of the extra day isn't practical. For 
those who do still want to hang out to chat and scheme, we'll 
designate a spot to do so.

I'll announce more concrete details as soon as I'm able.