More than 200 people around the world devoted their time and brainpower to improving the Django Web framework this weekend, during a scheduled Django coding sprint. On Friday, September 14th, the first day of the sprint, some Django developers gathered at Google's offices in Chicago and Mountain View for the benefits of in-person communication, camaraderie and, yes, free food.
17 people showed up at Google Chicago, which was a sort of ground zero for the sprint, with the project's BDFLs Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss in attendance. Another 7 people participated from Google's Mountain View office, which was linked with Chicago via videoconference.
Python creator (and Google employee) Guido van Rossum even stopped by via videoconference to give a pep talk about Django version 1.0 and share some of his experience running a large open-source project.
The sprint was intensely productive, with more than 400 tickets closed in the Django issue-tracking system, 300 new patches/ticket attachments and more than 200 commits to the Django code base. All told, there were more than 2,440 changes, including wiki changes, ticket changes, patch uploads and code check-ins.
Overall, the consensus was: "We should do this more often!"
The Chicago sprinters, hard at work (photo by Jacob Kaplan-Moss)
