The Django sprint took place on December 1st, and while I couldn’t commit too much time I did manage to add a patch for one ticket, for making 403 pages customizable instead of being hard-coded.
It wasn’t an extremely difficult ticket since there were ample examples of how 404 and 500 pages enabled customization. I paired with my colleague Ionut on the ticket and we went about it pretty comprehensively imho, with tests for our changes, and also added tests for the CSRF middleware (previously there were none).
One minor issue with the sprint was the server outage for the Django Trac site that lasted a few hours. Surely someone had to know about this before hand (the hosting company gave 10 days notice) and could have done anything from simply posting about the outage on the sprint wiki page to making arrangements for the page to be mirrored.
Also it might have been more efficient to divvy out tickets before the sprint itself, instead of a “come and grab what you’d like to do” approach. I understand that the core devs don’t want to be too heavy-handed in managing the project, but I think a worldwide sprint could deal with a tad more organization.
These minor grievances aside I think the sprint went really well. Having events like this where everyone gets together (virtually or physically) is a good way to bring new developers into a project. At my office, we had several participants unfamiliar with Django itself, let alone Django internals. But by the end of the sprint they left with some knowledge of Django, and the entire workflow behind contributing to it.
