TurboGears October 2005 Mad Dash (Sprint)

Today, we had the first TurboGears Mad Dash. I figured that calling it a “sprint” is probably not accurate, given that most sprints last several times the length of today’s mad dash.

Including myself, we had 10 participants. Given that I had announced my desire to hold a sprint just a few days after TurboGears’ public release, the turnout was very good. Most of the people there were members of michipug (including two that I hadn’t met before), and we also had two hearty travelers from Cleveland.

I thought the day went well! Given that TurboGears is a three-week-old project (built on much older projects, of course), I hadn’t expected that we were going to generate thousands of lines of code (and we didn’t, of course). But, I had expected that people would get a chance to dive in a bit and learn what makes things tick and to collaborate and generate ideas.

On those counts, the day was exactly what I had hoped for. We’ve got some good direction planned for some TurboGears’ 0.9 features, and 9 more people have now had some experience working inside various parts of TurboGears. We also spotted a bug in the forthcoming 0.8 release… it’s always a bonus to be able to stop a bug before the software ships.

A few people expressed interest in doing another sprint, possibly for a longer time than this one (less mad dash-like). The next one will also get moving faster, given that people have more familiarity than they did before. On IRC yesterday, there was talk about a “remote sprint”, which sounds a bit trickier to pull off. We’ll have to see about the remote one, but I’m sure there will be another Ann Arbor in person sprint sometime in the not-too-distant future.