Sprints

When and where?

Sprints will be held over two days at Impact Hub Amsterdam.
Haarlemmerweg 10C
1014 BE Amsterdam
(google map)

  • 10am - 6pm on Saturday, 5th of Nov.
    Lunch will be provided at 1pm, but not breakfast.
  • 10am - 2pm on Sunday, 6th of Nov.
    Food is not provided on this day, but there are plenty of restaurants around.

Doors open at 9:30am both days.

For the first time sprinters

Sprints are a time of concentrated effort to make the Django project and its ecosystem better. We're going to improve Django and related projects. Can you do it? Yes! It's not hard, and we're here to help you if you get lost. The Django documentation has a good writeup on how to contribute and we've prepared some tips to you get going.

Preparations

Start by downloading the Django source code and running the test suite. If you do this before the day of the sprints, that'll help you get a quick start, but if you run into trouble, you can get help during the sprints.

It's also useful to look for a ticket to work on before the first day of the sprints, so you'll have some time to think about the solution and, if it's a large feature, discuss the design on the django-developers mailing list. Of course, you might get an idea of something to work on during the talks and that's fine too. It's advantageous but not required to find a ticket in advance.

If you want to chat about ideas of things to work on, feel free to ping Tim Graham, the Django fellow. He's contracted full-time by the Django Software Foundation to shepherd Django development and assist contributors. You can find him in the #django-dev IRC channel as timograham. You can also email him at his address in the Django commit logs, especially if IRC is difficult because your time zone doesn't overlap much with his, EDT (UTC-4). That being said, there are Django contributors from all over the world who hang out in #django-dev, so don't limit yourself to asking Tim for advice.

If you get the Django test suite running on your machine and find a ticket to work on, you should be ready to start coding! Remember, if you have problems along the way you can ask sprint organizers or other sprinters for help. If you want to know more, the Django documentation goes into more detail about running the tests and working with GitHub.

What to do?

On the day of the sprints, join our #django-sprint IRC channel.

Django is a big project and there's lot's of things you can do. Check out Advice for new contributors in Django documentation, it lists things do, but in short those are:

You can use Django Development Dashboard for browsing tickets by various predefined criteria. You can also take a look at a prepared list of tickets needing patch improvements.

The sprints are a great opportunity to talk to fellow Django programmers, including members of the core team, so take advantage of it. Talk to people about what's your pain with Django. Pair with someone on a ticket: two pairs of eyes are better than one. Don't be afraid to ask questions, and don't give up!

When you're ready to create a pull request, check your patch with the patch review checklist, then ask a friend to review your patch. If all looks good, the friend can mark the ticket's "Triage State" as "Ready for checkin". Someone from the Django team will take a final look at the patch and merge it if all looks good. Don't worry if your patch isn't merged during the sprints. In fact, we don't usually merge a lot of patches during sprints because there are many more people writing patches than reviewing them, and members of the Django team are more effective during a sprint providing high level advice to many people rather than doing a few detailed code reviews. Get your patch to "Ready for checkin" status, then bang the gong to celebrate your success!

Have fun!