Core code sprinting at DrupalCon Barcelona

I’ve been to sprints before and always found them to leave me a little wanting. You wander into a quiet room of people coding, there are usually a few recognisable faces, although often well-known core contributors than friends.

The goal in Barcelona was to attend the sprint day working towards completing an issue and then see what was happening in the afternoon (not necessarily more sprinting!). What happened was something else entirely.

Drupalcon had three sprint rooms available: a first-time sprinters room, dedicated to helping people get builds set up, how to find issues to work on, create patches, etc.; a general sprint room that seemed to be made up of groups of people working on contrib modules; and a mentored core sprint room. Amazingly they were all filling up quickly, each housing somewhere in the region of 100-200 people!

It was the latter that I walked into and was immediately asked what sort of work I wanted to take on. The room had several yellow t-shirt wearing mentors available to hand out relevant issues to be worked on, rather than leaving sprinters to look for themselves.

The ticket that I looked into taking on was quite a large issue that had been around for a while. Before long, I was sitting at a table with others looking for things to do. I explained what the issue was and how we may go about tackling it. The work was quickly split four ways, lending itself to everyone’s strengths: PHP, JS, CSS and research/testing.

As a team, we worked on this ticket until a break came around for lunch. The morning had been filled with several discussions about how we might tackle the ticket and ended up going through several iterations before settling on a solution.

After lunch, work continued on this issue until an announcement was made that there would be live commits for those whose tickets had been accepted as ready. This really gave some impetus to the work being done, as having code (you’d just written) being committed to core live would be something that doesn’t happen very often at all.

When the time came, everyone piled into the first-time sprinters room where Angie (AKA, 'webchick') was ready to present.

The mentors were all introduced with a round of applause, recognising the hard work that they’d put into making the day such a success.

Unfortunately, the issue that we were working on wasn’t ready in time, but it was great to see some other work being committed live. Everyone had a chance to say who they were and what they had contributed to the ticket. It was very encouraging to see all pieces come together and be equally appreciated, whether it was initially raising the ticket, putting code together and creating patches, testing or reviewing.

Following the live commits, we got back to working on the issue that we’d been given, although all too quickly 6pm came around and the warning came that the conference centre was closing.

Having had initial thoughts of how long we might stay sprinting, it was very surprising that everyone got so caught up in the atmosphere, working towards making Drupal 8 a better product.

Work continues on the issue, having been looked into by some of the more senior core contributors. 

I’d encourage anyone to get involved with code sprints, especially if you haven’t before, as it appears that the barrier to entry is lowering. Getting commits RTBC’d (Ready To Be Committed) is another matter entirely...

Special thanks to Rachel for mentoring and the team I worked with: Adrian, Jari and Darko. 

All in all, it was a great day, full of drive and enthusiasm. Can’t wait for the next one!