Hosting Drupal Global Sprint Weekend 2017

Drupal Global Sprint Weekend, which took place last weekend sees Drupal developers from around the world come together to contribute to the open source content management system’s codebase. On Saturday, in London, we took the opportunity to give back to the Drupal community by hosting a sprint at the Manifesto studio.

Wait, what’s a Drupal sprint?

For those who don’t know what a code sprint is, here’s a good definition taken directly from the Drupal website:

A code sprint is getting developers for a set amount of time
– usually one to two days – and just writing code. That’s it.

You’re not teaching anything. Participants will learn from others as they go,
but the focus is not on instruction. The goal is to create working software.

Essentially we just made some time and space for Drupal developers to work on outstanding issues for Drupal core or its most popular modules. But there was also room for Drupal newcomers to get to grips with the CMS and work towards becoming core contributors by completing the lessons in the Drupal Ladder.

So, in effect, we were running both an Issue Sprint and a Learn Sprint.

What did we achieve?

We are quite proud to say that our first experience of running a Drupal sprint was an amazing success:

• There were 10 participants, 6 of whom were first time contributors;
• We had Drupal Ladder and Sprint areas running simultaneously;
• We consumed 3 pots of coffee, 15 bags of tea, 5 cans of Coke and 10 pizzas during the day;
• Our concentration was interrupted just once (apart from the lunch break) by a 15-minute hailstorm;
• We worked on 17 Issues during the day, 3 of which are RTBC (Reviewed and Tested by the Community) and 1 is Fixed (to be honest it was already fixed, we just flagged it).

All issues are tracked on the Drupal website. If you look for just those with the SprintWeekend2017 tag, you’ll see that out of the 188 issues tackled over the whole weekend, worldwide, we worked on almost 10% of them!

What’s next?

In the Issue Sprint area we tried to focus on experimental modules like Workflow, Content Moderation and Datetime Range as these need to be stable before Drupal 8.4.0-beta1 (in six months), while the guys in the Drupal Ladder room tackled some ‘Novice’ issues.

Each and every attendee left the studio asking when the next Sprint would be – which makes us feel over the moon! Giving back to Drupal is important, easy and fun, so our prompt answer was always ‘Very soon!

Many thanks to everyone who participated and supported. If you’d like to stay informed about future Drupal sprints at Manifesto, please sign up for our newsletter.