DrupalCon Munich code sprints were a great success

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I took a train from Frankfurt (Germany) down to Munich the Saturday before the DrupalCon. When I joined the Multilingual Sprint on Sunday morning, many of them had already been sprinting for a full day and a number of issues were ready for review, so I dived in, observing the behavior of Drupal 8 before and after applying patches, proof-reading the patches for anything odd (e.g. typos in the documentation), discussing the issues in comments and in IRC with people who were sitting just across the room (other times actually speaking in person). By the end of the day, instead of the dozen or so people that Gábor Hojtsy, the Multilingual Initiative team lead, had expected, there were close to 50 people at the location, some joining us in the work on Multilingual issues, some working on other Drupal 8 tasks, and some who were just arriving in Munich and followed the Tweets to where we were. Luckily, the location rented for the Saturdays and Sundays before and after the DrupalCon week was big enough to accommodate all the extra arrivals.

While on the topic of the venue we used for those weekends, I’d like to personally thank Stephan Luckow [2] and Florian (“Floh”) Klare [3] of the Drupal-Initiative e.V. [4] for all that they did to find a nice place that would still leave us with a budget for food and for their valiant work on stretching the food budget while still serving up excellent fare, in keeping with the fantastic meals we enjoyed the rest of the week [5]. Instead of ordering delivery, they prepared almost everything themselves, including beautiful open-face sandwiches, fruit platters, and lovely grilled specialties at a club we went to where you can barbecue in the Biergarten.

…thanks for the huge help to the local organizers, especially Florian Klare and Stephan Luckow [2]. They helped us manage collecting and spending sponsor money wisely with the Drupal Initiative e.V, prepared great sandwiches and fruit plates for us and even organized a sprinter party night with grill food. It was amazing to work with such helpful and flexible local organizers.
—Gábor Hojtsy, September 5, 2012 [6]

Since people were “fresh”, I think a lot of work got done on the first weekend and the Monday before the conference (more than 50 people joined us and worked on various core [8] initiatives on Monday in the room we later used for core most conversations at the Sheraton), which also meant that issues were still fresh in our minds while we had days of sessions and conversations, so when we started sprinting again on Friday we had lots of new ideas for the tasks we were still working on. Friday’s sprints were at the Westin Grand, where there was great attendance both upstairs in the main room as well as a large room downstairs from it, where Drupalize.me hosted a core contribution workshop to ease people into the process of contributing to core. I decided to go to that workshop since I’m still pretty new to it all and found a few people sitting nearby who were I was also able to interest in some Multilingual tasks, so while the main group sprinted upstairs, we also worked downstairs. Later on, I came upstairs, and since there were not a lot of simpler tasks for “core newbies”, like myself, I took some time to sprint on a module [9] I contributed [10] some time back, before there was much of anything for Drupal 7 in the area of “multilingual”… and tried to make my module more multilingual-friendly. I got a few good commits and a new release out for Internal Links and also recruited a colleague to look at the code with me, provide some ideas, and become another maintainer. So I personally found Friday quite productive.

 

First off, a sprint on this scale would not be possible without sponsors and significant on-site help. DrupalCon provided us with space on Monday and Friday, and some great food on Friday. The rest of the days would not have been doable without comm-press [11], dotProjects.be [12], Open8.se [13], OSINet [14] and Acquia [15]. The [ … ] financial sponsorships they provided paid for our weekend venue [ … ].

—Gábor Hojtsy, September 5, 2012 [6]

I continued sprinting with the Multilingual initiative at the Film Coop [16] Saturday and Sunday, leaving mid-afternoon on Sunday to get back to the train station. When I left the other sprinters, Webchick was only finally getting some rest after her trip home and we had about 20 issues that were marked “RTBC”. In all, there were dozens of issues tackled over the weekend. For a complete overview of all the issues we made progress on, see Gábor’s post about the sprints [6], where you can also check out his excellent DrupalCon core conversation presentation, “Drupal 8’s Multilingual Wonderland [17]”. There is still a lot to do in the time between now and the “feature freeze” deadline, but we made good progress in the DrupalCon sprints, so hopefully we can push on and get the rest of the critical tasks done in the time remaining.

One of the less trivial tasks I took on during the final sprint weekend was documenting the new language_select field type [18], which involved checking out the Drupal API [19] (documentation [20]) project, updating the Form API table [21] to include a new Element column (language_select [22]) and Property row (#languages [22]), as well as information about these (below the table) and linking them in all the appropriate places. Currently, updating this page [23] is a bit of a pain, but hopefully we will move to a better system for maintaining this information, perhaps even automated generation [24]. While I’d worked on other Drupal documentation pages before, this was the first time I’d actually contributed patches to update the API, so it was a good learning experience.

If you’d like to help out with the Multilingual initiative or other core contribution, you might first want to take a look at the Drupal 8 Initiatives [25] page, where announcements about coming IRC meeting can be seen. This page also has links to the news, roadmaps, filtered issues, and other pertinent information. Drupalladder.org [26] is also a great place to go for lessons to help you work through the steps of being ready to contribute to Drupal core.

I look forward to seeing you all in IRC and in coming code sprints.