Sprints

45 people from around the world came together for three days to make CiviCRM better.

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.

Don't forget your sunscreen! The Global Community Summit is coming to Barcelona on October: Register Now!

I didn’t hide the fact that I’d been feeling daunted by the prospect of the Sprint. Knowing that I’d be the least techie by some way even amongst the non-devs, I was also acutely aware of being a newbie to the community - after a year and a half as a CiviCRM user, I’d only had five weeks of working with Rose Lanigan and learning the basics of implementation. But I needn’t have worried, soon realising that:

a)       In any group, someone has to be the least technical. It’s an opportunity to learn and to bring a different perspective.

Last week we had a remote sprint to improve documentation, and wow, what a success it was!

Progress

• The sprint was focused on improving the User Guide.

• Check out everything we did.

• GitHub tells us:

This year we will have two CiviCamps in the UK to choose from!

• May 15th in London

• October 5th in Manchester

Last week we had a Sprint in the wonderful city of Brussels. This blog post is a recap of what I have been up to.

Form Processor

I started the sprint to work on a new extension the form processor.  This idea came to my mind as I had a few clients at which I had to develop a custom api for data coming from their website (in those cases CiviCRM was separated from the website). And my idea was that I wanted to give system administrator and implementers a tool in which they could create those kind of API by themselves. So the form processor was born.

We are excited to announce the CiviCRM conference in Brussels in February 2018!

User Conference

Sprint

Following the user conference, there will be a non-residential 4-day sprint for contributors.

Writing on the train back to London from the CivicCRM Sprint at Duvale Priory in mid-Devon, I can see why some people are willing to travel from across the world for the Sprint: it is a great way to spend a week. I went for the Developer Training, delivered by Parvez and Raj of Veda Consulting. The training was held for two days alongside a week's sprint (5 days + 2 travel days). I stayed for the rest of the Sprint.

Greetings from Montréal!

We have officially released CDN Tax Receipts extension 1.4.0 for 4.6 / 4.7 : https://civicrm.org/extensions/cdn-tax-receipts

Current Features:

This was my first sprint; I came somewhat prepared from reading other ‘first sprint’ blogs in that I brought a laptop set up with Ubuntu and Buildkit. Beyond that technical hurdle I came with no ideas of what to expect, hoping that I could both learn and contribute.

The sprint was at a beautiful old house in the middle of a large farm in Maryland complete with cows, a fire pit, and cable Internet (albeit probably the thinnest cable any of us have experienced in awhile)!

Developer training

CiviCooP and Systopia and Palasthotel have been working together on CiviProxy and CiviProxy. This blog is a round up of what we have achieved in the last couple of days. The first thing we have achieved is that we had fun and a very good work atmosphere. We made long days and made lots of progress.

What are CiviProxy and CiviMcRestFace?

This year we had a sprint after CiviCon Cologne. So far I have only been to a sprint in Edale UK. The Germans copied everything from that sprint, remote location with hardly any internet. But with Germans you know it is done well. So the internet was faster (but still slow). The remote location had a bbq place, swimming pool and sauna.

Following what was a successful annual gathering for CiviCRM community at CiviCON St. Louis, the traditional Sprint commenced boasting 35 in attendance including participants from New Zealand, UK, Canada, and folks from all over the US from the east to west coasts. The Sprint is an annual opportunity for the CiviCRM community to come together and work on developing the CiviCRM software in a context that allows face-to-face interaction as opposed to the usual remote work and conversations.

During the Sprint, a number of groups are created to work on different topics such as coding, marketing and documentation for the software.

Thursday 23th and Friday 24th of March we are having a mini-sprint in the Ede (NL) in which we will fix CiviCRM bugs. We are with four of us already (Erik Hommel, Alain Benbassat, Klaas Eikelboom and me) so it is going to be fun! That is the main reason and the other reason is that we want to contribute to CiviCRM Core.

Our plan is to have two days for fixing CiviCRM bugs once in the month or once in the two months. But at least regularly and fitting to our busy schedule.

So if you are in the neighborhood we want to invite you for joining us so it going to be more fun.

This year, around 25 dedicated and fascinating people have gathered together in Edale, Peak District, to make improvements, discuss progress, and learn more about the CiviCRM project. Some have already left us and some will be here right up to the end of the weekend, but we have all contributed to the project in a helpful and constructive way.

One of the top goals for the CiviCRM roadmap is to improve the theming to look good on more websites and devices. That's a big task and it won't happen overnight, but I want to stop and appreciate the progress we've already made plus other improvements in the works:

If you've been using CiviCRM for a while, you most likely already know that it is developed by a diverse bunch of people from around the world. Sprints are the time and place when these folks get together to get things done.

Inspired by a colleague I suggested we report today's sprint events in Haiku. Here are the burnt offerings from Colarado!