Sprinting in New York City

Last week saw the first CiviCRM sprint in New York city. For those new to the community or open source software sprints are probably a bit of a strange concept. I know I sometimes struggle to explain them to border control agents as I enter the US.... But really a sprint is just a way to take time out of your day to day work life to learn, meet people and collaborate and to see a bit about how CiviCRM works behind the scenes. They are usually pretty casual and the vibe and focus can vary a lot - from large sprints with lots of newcomers alongside dev camps to smaller sprints focussed on developing specific functionality.

One feature of sprints going back for the entire 10 years that I have been going to them is good food. This sprint was no exception. Dana Skallman really wowed us by actually making not just the dinner but the bread, the mustard, the jam, the everything. It was a real treat and we were grateful for that, along with Dana's organising skills which saw about 50 people attend the preceeding CiviCamp, despite it being announced rather late due to issues finanalising the venue for the camp. Jon Goldberg provided the venue and organization for the sprint and ensured we got the best bagels!

For a few practical reasons the focus on this sprint was very much people who were actively engaged in delivering CiviCRM coming together and hammering a bunch of things out (yes it was a bit of a talkfest :-). We covered important topics like 'can bees count' but also a bunch of practical CiviCRM topics - you can see non-curated notes here. 

This feels like a good time to acknowledge the people who contribute to CiviCRM on a regular basis. This is something I always shy away from because of the risk of missing someone out so rather than trying to do a complete list I'm just going to highlight 3 people / organisations whose regular and significant commitment people might not be aware of. First on my list was a group who cared but couldn't be there. CiviCoop have taken on triaging our gitlab issue tracker, rotating the work between themselves (and Systopia I believe but their number hasn't been up yet). So far Erik Hommel and Jaap Jansma have had a turn. Present at the sprint were Kevin Cristiano from Tadpole Collective who every month runs through our release candidates with a structured UI testing regime and AGH Strategies who read through every PR to compile release notes - we are grateful to both Andrew Hunt and Alice Frumin for this ongoing effort as well as to the very very many other contributors who I haven't even attempted to mention in this blog.