Hi Lars,
On 17/12/2009, at 08:16 , Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf wrote:
several people have expressed interest in a GNUstep hacking
session during the days of FOSDEM. Since I never before organized
a hacking session I want to discuss the modalities with you. My
main questions are:
- should we hold that session already on friday (in some hotel
room), on saturday in the FOSDEMs hacker room or on sunday morning
in our devroom?
To some degree, all three. If the first sessions are good and
productive, more sessions will follow as people want to do more.
Starting early also gives people a chance to meet each other and
get excited about something. Then they have the weekend to get
together and make it happen.
- how to run such a hacking session? Does everybody sit in front
of his laptop silently typing or is some sort of moderation needed?
That depends on how you want to run it, and what people want out of
it. See below...
- how long will such a code sprint or hacking session last
ideally? open end (then I think friday or saturday would be
better) or are just two hours enough (then we could schedule it
for sunday morning before our talks start)?
- and of course: who wants to participate?
So let me explain a few things.
A "hacking" session has traditionally been a time and place for
people to come and hack on whatever they want. Its un-moderated,
informal and works best when people generally know each other.
A "code sprint" is a session (or series of sessions) to explore a
particular problem or feature.
Agile teams tend to organise sprint times and pair programmers each
session.
So my suggestion is this:
Friday: Prep night
Introduce people and the evening.
In each half hour session, each of the sprint topics will be
presented by the topic leader to two other programmers. This is
going over the problem/feature, key bits of code and ideas about
solving it.
A five minute break, then the second session. The second session is
the same as the first with different people presenting and listening.
If there are enough topics and enthusiasm, you can run as many such
sessions as are needed/wanted.
Saturday: Sprint
The sprint is to be done in pairs in the hacker room. Start times
and lengths are up to the teams. People know who is working on what
from the night before.
They've had some time since the presentation to think about what
needs to be done and how to do it.
The reality is teams can start whenever they want after the
presentations so its entirely possible that some people when back
to their rooms and spent the night hacking away.
Sunday: Wrap-up
Each topic leader gets say 3-5 minutes to summarise the weekend
effort and say whatever they'd like.
To to this you need to call for topics and expressions of interest.
You need to organise the presentation groups and schedule outline.
However, on the weekend you really only need to run the Friday and
Sunday sessions and that won't be hard.
BTW, the wiki is a really good tool for the teams. They can make
notes there and record their efforts. The pages don't need to last
but will be useful. Everyone is likely to be very tired on Sunday
morning so notes will help a lot for the wrap-up.
Why do I think such a thing is a good idea? Well, people get to
meet on Friday. There already has been a list of topics floating
around so they know what they're interested in. Its a neat way to
get communication and cooperation happening. The advantage of the
weekend is face to face time so this is a way of encouraging that
without being heavy handed about it.
Anyway, that's just my thoughts. I'm happy to help you out with the
topics and scheduling etc but that's about all I can really do as I
won't be attending :( Ich wohne in Australia. Sehr weit weg.
Regards,
Sheldon
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