> I will be physically present at the hackathon in Cambridge.

Most Guix developers are not in the US, but it would be great if you
could find interested people in Cambridge.

> I have experience with Guile, but I haven't done much work with package
> management systems before.

That’s not a problem at all.  Guix has a wonderful EDSL, so even people
without programming experience should be able to package things.  I
highly recommend to check these slides [1].

> Would I still be useful?

Yes!  Everyone can help: designers, translators, documentation writers,
etc.  So bring a friend!

> Is there anything that you would recommend I do to prepare for this
> weekend besides install Guix and poke around?

Try to write a package recipe for a simple program.  You might want to
start with the one that’s already present in ‘gnu/packages’, so you
could check yourself.  Then you could package something that you use
daily.  This talk [2] (slides [3]) provides a good overview and answers
some popular questions.  (For instance, it talks about supported build
systems.)

Since you know Guile, you could also help with command line tools.  (Ask
on the guix-devel list if you’re interested.)

[1] https://gnu.org/software/guix/guix-ghm-andreas-20130823.pdf
[2] http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/ghm2013/Ludovic_Courtes-GNU_Guix_the_computing_freedom_deployment_tool_.webm
[3] https://gnu.org/software/guix/guix-ghm-ludo-20130823.pdf