Why Code Sprints? And How?
self intros
General topics:
- How are people using hackathons
- How to bring in people (non-coders)
- sustainability.
What is the win?
Maybe not the code produced. Everyone agrees sprints are good, but it is hard to put finger on specific results.
- sand drawings / mandelas made by Tibetan monks get destroyed after use
- pizza oven sprint, masons get together and* build an oven.
wins:
- design of pizza ovens
- practice of building.
What is sustainability?
* does the code get supported * does the code get reviewed / commited.
What is a hackathon ?
Getting people together for a short amount of time 3 to 24 hours who care about something to work on goals
example: DrupelCon codepsrint after every 'Con, issues are identified people go to room to classes of
Drupal Media Module code sprint was committers only for 5 days.
Commonality, is bringing together people ordinarily not physically together.
Examples: code sprints
Mapping parties.
Pros
- Access to core contributors.
- getting people in same room to improve
- easy entry for new people
- limited commitmen
- get a lot of work done in short amount of time (debtable: )
- Energy --requires building on ongoing
- build community
- somebody reading your code 10 minutes later
- face to face contact
Cons (caveats?)
- civic hackathons by boston city to design apps build apps for selves
- pub crawl app won.
- need to have people in room who aren't developers or designers but users
- focus is hard to come by
- walking in with a goal is needed but rare
- need incentives to focus
- money in contest incentive
- sustainability is huge
- be clear on goals: sort ideas ? sort solutions ?
- proof of concept good.
- contest
- goals important
- What are you going to do with half finished thing.
- don't think about getting a product.
- tough to get city staff involved on saturday
future code sprint ideas
- define problems
Important things for good sprints
- organize , have things for people to do
- easier with established projects with issue queues
- get in designers not coders
- designers won't sit behind screen for 18 hours
- think about setup to attract diversity of people
definitions
Contests vs adding to code base hackathons where developers more built around publicity than results.
Here's an event we're great
Getting users & coders together winds up as design sprint 24 sprint for web site development
Layers maodule
Took code in sub optional
Contest hackathons
- when city has contest doesn't create product because it doesn't fit RFP
app contests that offer $1000 for a year's work.
TS people
Still inclined to do a sprint but manage expectations, focus on RFP