Jon Stahl’s Journal

Whit Morriss, who recently led the fantastic Plone commuinty “BBQ Sprint” in North Carolina, published a few great bullet points of sprinting wisdom titled “Get Your Sprint On.”

• Don’t [work|code|drink] alone
  Sprints are social event above all and you plural are the main resource.
  
  
• Socks, then shoes:
  Start at a starting point, move in a direction.
  
  1. Start with a plan
     your POA.  Maybe you POA is a part of a five year plan for world domination.  Maybe you just want to learn how to write better doctests.  All that matter is that you have a plan so you have a plan you can change.
     
     
  2. Focus
     the main things is keeping the main thing the main thing.
     
     
  3. Flow like water
     The A stands for adaptation as well as action… a project’s POA is determined by it’s participant’s needs and desires.   As new information becomes available, plans change.
     
     
  4. Do First Things First
     don’t expect to code features if your project don’t have tests, packaging, docs, buildscripts etc. 
     
     
  5. Do what you need to do
     If things aren’t working, adjust your POA to focus on making them work
     
     
• Test first and [ask questions | talk trash] later
  Everyone has questions and opinions.  Make yours better by doing everything you can to test them before you disseminate. Sometimes the best question is “how do I test this?” rather than “How do I do this?” or “why doesn’t this work?”.
  
  As for opinions, sharing information is the greatest part of opensource.  The better the your information, the better you can contribute, the better F/OSS is.  Good tests are golden, talk is cheap.
  

• Code Club is a state of mind
  Live this priceless advice from the people who brought you SVN.
  
  
• Have Fun!!!!!

Tags: Collaboration, Computer infrastructure, Plone