PrimaGIS/Zope3 Sprint Wrap Up

I got back to Fort Collins at 1:30 a.m. today and have tried to come up with a brief summary of the PrimaGIS and Zope 3 code sprint hosted by OpenApp last week. We did not provide much commentary during the event. You really had to be there, as the expression goes. Our colleagues on the #zco channel on IRC or subscribers to the project commits list saw only a flood of commit messages.

What is a code sprint, anyway? It is a very intensive coding session with multiple developers working at a rate that is not sustainable for long. Hence the word sprint. It works well for Python programming, and has become a part of the culture. We went at it for 3 solid days. Kai and Michael probably could have gone longer, but I was pretty cooked at the end.

This was a smaller one than the Zope 3 sprint Michael had been in last year, and fairly easy to coordinate. We started out with a whiteboard full of goals and issues, and it flowed from there. We would work together for a bit, then split up across a bunch of tasks, repeating in a cycle. With more developers we definitely would have needed a coach or two to keep us synchronized and prevent bottlenecks, something to keep in mind for the next time. I brought my iBook to the sprint, which has been more of a business than development computer for me of late, and suffered a bit. It was a bit like running multiple 400s in dress shoes.