The absolute highlight of any conference for me are the sprints either right
before or after the “main event”. WriteTheDocs has something similar called
“Writing Day” where participants for instance help improving other projects'
documentation or even do the first iteration on them.
Sadly, Neither last year nor at this year’s Portland-based event I managed to make it there but this time’s travel plan made it finally possible to participate 😊 As with other sprint-like events there was a quick introduction round where some of the projects were presented:
- WikiData (the database-sibling of Wikipedia) should receive a more easy to use guide to SPARQL (the query language exposed to the end-user).
- PyLadies wanted to improve their blog.
- The Mozilla Development Network (MDN) was looking for help improving their content in general.
While esp. the WikiData project sounded mighty interesting, I remembered that Eric was looking for some help with the WTD website itself. For instance, some of the older conferences used a completely different storage structure (plain HTML tables) for the talks while this year’s events had their talk data stored in JSON files for easier rendering. The perfect task to learn the project and facilitate further improvements 😊
Right before lunch someone was also looking for help getting started with Sphinx. I’m not really an expert here but we still managed to get him started!
Our whole table was very productive, actually. Martina cleaned up some of our internal Confluence spaces and Ulrich began working on v2 of pyformat.info! Great stuff all around!
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