Montréal in September is an enthralling an time and place to be part of. With so many universities, you can hardly walk three blocks without bumping into a group of young persons dressed with their grand parents’ cloths and proudly holding signs announcing their initiation. People moving in, shopping for books, meeting old friends in brew pubs, typing on their laptop while sitting on a park bench. These parks, are slowly left behind as the weather cools down and as cafés fill up once again.
For us too, at Montréal-Python, the vacation must end and we have to get back to work with new presentations and sprints. The preparation for our next meeting is going well and we should be able to announce a date soon. Beside that, we will have two sprints in September: one on Django translation on 2010-09-22 and one on the Python Packaging System on 2010-09-29. As usual, both will start at 6h30pm and will go on as long as people are standing. The most likely location is the Brasseurs Numériques’ office but we have other options in our sight so wait for some announcement later on to confirm the venue.
“What are these sprints anyway?”,
you may ask. During a sprint, a bunch of hackers get together and start working towards a common goal. You arrive there with your laptop, you grab a drink from the fridge, most likely a beer but other options are available, then you ask what everyone is working on. At this point, you might decide to pair with someone else or you may elect to work one some other aspect of the project, in which case you let everyone know what your plans are.
“Why would I join the sprint instead or working from home?”,
you probably wonder at this point. Beside all the merriness that usually ensues from simpling having a bunch of people sitting together with their favorite beverage, mine being beer in case you are wondering, you will typically be much more productive when you have many experts at hand to give you some help when you get stuck. That or you get much less productive as you spend your evening helping others to become super stars, just like you. “Wait, how did you just do that?”, you will probably ask at some point, “in Bash, CTRL-r searches in your history” is the likely reply from your coach. Sprints are like that; you learn new ways to be productive, not things that you would read in books, but the kind of tips and tricks that makes your life easier.
“What if I’m a total noob?”,
Well in that case we don’t want you. Just kidding. We want new comers at sprint because it’s the best place to teach them how to become self sufficient, and it’s much more effective to help them while sitting beside them then by instructing them on a mailing list. We once had one guy come to a sprint without having Python installed on his computer. When he left, he had committed a unit test for distutils2. He is now a core Python contributor.
“That’s cool! Where do I sign up?”,
I’m glad you asked, because venues that are good for sprinting are not very large and we have to restrict participation accordingly. You can make sure that there will be room for you by signing-up on our wiki. If you can’t attend for one reason or the other, you can always work with us remotely and coordinate by IRC, on #montreal-python on irc.freenode.net.
This is what sprinting is all about, and this is why we do it. We hope to see many new faces in our September sprints.
