At the weekend, we had support from our friends from erdfisch in Heidelberg and had a Views Codesprint as office opening because of our new facilities. By organizing a Codesprint we want to enforce the know-how for Views in Germany and we as part of the international community want to offer more support and help to the development of Views.

Even though the Sprint was set up at short notice and in pre-Christmas time, the participation was overwhelming. Frank Holldorf announced immediately the sponsorship for the event and sent three developers from Heidelberg, including Daniel Wehner, clearly the best known Views maintainer in Europe.
undpaul from Hanover came with three developers. Plus, we had even more people who did not want to miss the fun and came despite the massive delay of the trains. That was the reason why the people from Erdfisch arrived at Hamburg at Saturday 3.30a.m.

Code-Sprint turned into a Support-Sprint

Karsten organized the Codesprint using agile methods with open-space technology: After the breakfast we did a planning session in plenary. Who wants to do what / Who can deliver what.
Suprisingly, most of the topics that came around were about support and documentation. I was expecting that most of the people wanted to hack the features in Views.

We ended up building three groups:

• The support-team grabbed the issue queue. To measure the productivity provided from the group, we used the name "dvcs11" (for Drupal Views Code Sprint 2011) tag.
• The documentation-team decided to work on and improve Views 2 documentation first and then take it to Views 3 from there.
• The usability-team tried to figure out how to make Views better and how to improve the user interface accessibility. The presentations and discussions about the results on Sunday were stimulating. The discussion alone about the new Wizard for Views 3 fired up a bunch of suggestions about the improvements to be made. Quickly there were requests in the issue queue.

On Saturday at 13p.m. and 17p.m. we had efficient stand-up meetings going through all the participants. Everyone explained what he had done, what we has about to do and if there were any obstacles to overcome ("Impediment") which were delaying the improvement. Impediments were the most important information that had to be removed out of the way before the team could produce the best possible results.

Saturday evening there was pizza and asia-food for everybody, powered by erdfisch.
A huge thank you once again to Heidelberg!

Some devs left the support-team for coding some cool tools:

• Creating a Views-connection for Webforms
• Regular expression search in Views
• Implementation of an access layer for entities

In the end we could deliver ca. 300 worked issues and 60 commits for Views and another 40 for other modules.

You may find a report from Daniel in the erdfisch blog.

Muscular pain from the Codesprint

For the Sunday we planned to do some sports. For the pleasure of everybody we picked up a few Nerf-Guns and offered a possibility to arrange an office battle with foam ammunition which made a nice whistling sound in the air.

This morning, I had some muscular pain in my buttocks. Why? Because of dodging the ammos in a Nerfgun-Battle ;-)

Thank you Thomas for the recordings.

Codesprint TV

During the Sprint I interviewed some attendants about the reasons for taking part and about Drupal in general.

• Working for Drupal in general and specially for Views everyone found to be important subjects.
• There is interactive know-how transfer.
• Sprints strenghten the teamspirit and therefore allow developers working efficiently together after a short warmup-period when going to the next level in projects.
• It just makes fun...

Videos will be online soon. The slogan for the interview was pretty simple: "don't be shy, sei dabei..." ("don't be shy, just take part...")

Not just for nerds: Drupal noobies in Views Sprint

Among us were two participants who were dealing with Drupal for the first time. Thereby we had the chance to put our blindness about the Drupal user interface aside and study the basics of usability .

Thank you very much for all who were with us:

You were fantastic!

• Alexander Bentz, comm-press
• Elke Bövers, Taurus Media
• Stefan Borchert, undpaul
• Pascal Crott, erdfisch
• Andreas Doege, comm-press
• Tobias Freudenreich, Freudenreich Media
• Karsten Frohwein, comm-press
• Johannes Haseitl, undpaul
• Ralf Hendel, comm-press
• Thomas Jäger, PartMaster GmbH
• Ricardo Kelling, comm-press
• Tipi Koivisto, comm-press
• Sven Reher, Reher Consulting
• Jens Reinemuth, erdfisch
• Carsten Rhein, comm-press
• Timon Royer, Timon Royer Grafikstudio
• Steffen Rühlmann, HKS GmbH
• Anja Schirwinski, undpaul
• Karsten Violka, Karsten Violka
• Kai Wassermann, Kai Wassermann
• Florian Weber, [di] digitale informationssysteme gmbh
• Daniel Wehner, erdfisch