[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2009 Code sprint

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 04:45:49PM +0800, Tim Bowden wrote:
> The FOSS4G 2009 team are planning a 3 day code sprint.  The conference
> itself will be starting with workshops on Tuesday 20 Oct and finishing
> on Friday 23rd Oct.
> 
> The possibilities for the code sprint are for the preceding Wednesday-
> Friday giving a long weekend in between (giving time for touring, more
> coding or whatever) or Sat - Monday with no break between the code
> sprint and the conference.  What would people prefer?

I'm strongly in favor of the former.

For one, like Cape Town, Sydney is too long of a flight to make it just
a trip about the conference, in my opinion. We had an organized group do
a two day trip down the cape after the Code Sprint in Cape Town, and I
think it was a really successful bonding experience for those of us who
came along, allowing some non-coding social time where we all go to hang
out and know each other a little better, which I expect will help
develop better communications in the coming months within the project.

Also, having a break between the conference after the code sprint keeps
the possibility of having a 'finished' result of something by the
conference more likely as well. In general, code sprints are good at
producing a lot of unpolished code: a couple days can help to get the
code a bit more polished in order to present it as a new development
during the conference, if people so choose.

Lastly, I think that having a break before the conference gives people a
bit of time to unwind: code sprints tend to be exhausting if you do them
right (taking full advantage of shared physical location with long
hours, for example), and going directly from that into a conference
(described by one attendee as being similar to 'a 5 day long rave' due
to the amount of energy it consumes) feels dangerous. :)  

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer