FOSS4G'13

The working site for the conference committee of FOSS4G 2013

Code sprints - becoming marathons?

Posted by Barry Rowlingson on October 6, 2012

Looking back at past FOSS4G programmes, there's generally been one day flagged for 'code sprints'. I fired a quick message to the Qgis devs and asked if they'd be interested in holding a hackfest at FOSS4G, and part of the response seemed to be that a day wasn't enough for it to be worth devs coming, and if it ran alongside the conference they'd get distracted.

The current QGis hackfest is five days. I had a look at GRASS and Geoserver, and they both run five day developer meetings. Combining one of those with the conference would mean someone would be away from their day job for maybe nine days, with considerable expense in accomodation etc.

What can we expect from one-day code sprints? Shall I start a discussion on osgeo-discuss about what people can get from one day of sprinting, or whether they need two or three days?

Comments

Barend Köbben on October 6, 2012:

Good idea, but also try to ask the organisers (and participants?) of previous  1-day codesprints at Foss4G. There's quite some info on the 2011 CS wiki (http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2011_Code_Sprint), probably the same for earlier years...

Matt Walker on October 7, 2012:

Getting some feedback from the community would be good. I may also be worth sharing some of our thinking so far on code sprints: https://basecamp.com/1920286/projects/762306-foss4g-13/documents/1012502-code-sprints

My personal view is that people will not want to book out 9 consecutive days for the conference followed by a code sprint and that a day or two for planning and some hacking will be sufficient but as it's the communities conference I think we should ask.