Day 1

Wednesday, May 11, office of Babel Monkeys: the i18n Sprint Camp Berlin is about to start. Everyone present arranges their work area, introduces each other and gets familiar with the environments. Initiator Karsten Frohweinis a prey of Berlin’s traffic, so Gábor Hojtsy, Drupal 6 maintainer, consents to give the salutatory. Jose Reyerotakes the part of summarising our gathering’s goals afterwards by collecting issues and posting it to the whiteboard. I am surprised how calm and balanced the morning proceeds. No chaos, no commotion, high level of energy - quite impressing.

This is not the first event I am organising and usually catering, accommodation and setting is as important to participants as the actual reason people meet up for. While planning the sprint camp I was a bit worried we might not give enough variety to catering and entertainment, but soon after the kick-off I learned the whole lot is happy to meet up and focusses on the work they have to do. Not a single person shouts for a sumptuous lunch, fancy dinner or special entertainment - great experience to see the bunch of experts without any affectations. This would be enough of rave review if there wasn’t Pascal Crott who stole the show by hosting as many community members as want to stay at his place. Many thanks for being so awesome, Pascal! At the end of the day 5 out of 15 issues have been fixed - time to get some rest.

Day 2

Arriving at the coding venue part of the crew is coding already. Did they stay over night? I wouldn’t be surprised... The whiteboard shows 28 issues to be fixed, which seems to be an incentive to all attendants. This is my first coding sprint and I wonder at the silence in the room, but soon I learn that they are very communicative, though they don’t say a word: joining the sprint’s chat room explains it all :)

As you can’t live on coding only I want to mention all those who support our sprint camp by taking care of doing the grocery shopping, cleaning and sponsoring. Special thanks go to GiroSolution and Microsoft who digged deep into their pockets when I asked them for sponsoring the i18n Sprint Camp. We are able to have T-shirts, 5-day-tickets for public transport and many other things making this event as great as it is.

For dinner we have Pakistani food, which is splendid! I wished Daniel Wehner of Erdfisch could have had the opportunity to be here before Saturday as Erdfisch is sponsoring this dinner. Thanks a lot to Frank Holldorff and his Erdfisch-crew.

Day 3

It is Friday morning, the whiteboard shows 15 issues fixed as of Thursday night. 13 issues are waiting to be processed.

One huge thing marked as critical and wasting away for weeks on drupal.org is “Disabled taxonomy fields when enabling and disabling i18n_taxonomy”, but Daniel Nolde, Sascha Grossenbacher and Jose Reyero are the heros fixing it today. Tonight’s event is something special: it’s due to Stephan Luckow and sponsored by Wunderkraut that we have dinner at the Ethiopian restaurant Bejte Ethiopia.

For many of us it is not only the first time Ethiopian food, but eating with our hands. When seeing a dish with curly kale in the menu I am quite surprised as I always thought it is something all-North German - good to know people from Hamburg, Bremen and Lower Saxony can relieved start their Ethiopian holidays without passing on curly kale :)

Day 4

Good morning, Berlin. Jose Reyero announces the status quo of the work that has been done since kick off on Wednesday. 43 issues have been verified and 27 of them are already fixed. Sounds like an awesome result considering the sprint is not over yet.

We think hosting an event with international guests requires us to provide some cultural insight. It would be a shame if any of the sprint members had to go home saying "I was in Berlin, but the sprint camp could have been anywhere in the world as I didn't see a thing anyway". It is 4 o'clock in the after noon and we are visiting the Museum für Film und Fernsehen (Film and TV museum) for a guided tour. After learning about the German film history our guide shows us around the city mentioning places and background info concerning famous films made in Germany.

Back in the office Stephan Luckow prepared another terrific barbecue, so the whole lot of hungry people are happy to relax and have dinner while continuing sprinting or watching the Eurovision Song Contest :)

Day 5

Date of departure - quite a number of people are leaving straight to the airport without stopping by the sprint venue, so there is no huge farewell scene. But it doesn't feel bad as there is such a great commitment to the community that everybody knows to see each other sooner or later again for the next sprint camp, conference, user group or maybe our Drupal Camping 2011 in June.

Many thanks for making this sprint camp happen, we had a fantastic time and look forward to upcoming events!