Recap of TYPO3 Codesprint Dresden - 2nd-5th August 2018
A small group of dedicated people met in Dresden for four days of contributing to the TYPO3 core in the early days of August. Our host 3m5. made room in their busy schedule and provided us with desks, food, sweets and a part of their development team to tackle tasks all around TYPO3 core development.
As beautiful the 3m5. villa is, it does not provide air conditioning. Fans, lots of ice cream, motivation and enthusiasm let us produce a decent outcome of the sprint nonetheless.
As a side effect of working with new contributors that run Windows machines and use DDEV to set up their environments, we gained some more knowledge in this area, which resulted in improvements to the documentation concerning DDEV setup on Windows.
One of the things we really look forward to, but what we could not finish in time is a new viewhelper reference in the documentation that keep itself up-to-date by using the code documentation and examples of the viewhelper source files itself. A shout-out goes to Claus Due, who provided all the necessary tools to achieve this lofty goal. Expect the viewhelper reference to be published on https://docs.typo3.org in the very near future.
Some numbers
42 patches merged to master, 11 patches to 8.7.
48 new patches created in total, closed 55 (this applies to all branches)
Participants: 3 new contributors, 3 regular contributors, 2 Core Developers
4 full days, ca. 230 hours of work time
Average temperature in the office: way too hot.
Among the merged changes there have been some visual changes to the page tree and the form framework, that make the experience for editors more pleasant. For example, a patch was merged that is now aptly named ‘Remove ugly empty area when container element is empty’. It takes care of a detail in the form wizard and brings more harmony to this view. As a second example, the report module got the installed services view adjusted to fit better with the rest of the backend.
A patch that was started but not finished yet will provide more detailed information in the overview page of Typoscript Templates.
Code cleanup, testing code improvements, deprecations of unused or improved code are a usual and expected part of each sprint, this one is no exception.
A bugfix for Windows users brings back the proper detection of ImageMagick versions, so the test image handling of Maintenance module works again as expected (please note that this change was fully written and pushed through the review process by one of our first time contributors).
Extracurricular activities
Our friendly host 3m5. organized a speed boat trip on the river Elbe for us! Currently, thanks to the drought, almost all boat traffic is terminated, so we were almost alone. Our captain pointed out some of the beautiful sights Dresden had to offer, and the only rain in weeks of course caught us in the middle of the trip. But anyway or even because of that we had an awesome ride and a very relaxed hour, before having lunch. We can only recommend that kind of adventure should you visit Dresden.
During our social night out we had the chance to spend some time with our hosts and connect over TYPO3 and other topics. We missed that night hours to work on more patches, but that was worth it. With the high temperatures, we had to limit ourselves a bit anyway.
Conclusion
For an effective sprint the weather was too hot, and the amount of participants was too low. For those of us who took it up themselves to sit down and do things, it was an intense and pleasant time that left us in a satisfying state of exhaustion. We managed to finish tasks, put tasks forward and discuss open issues. Also, new highlights were set in motion. Overall, we had a nice time in Dresden (did I mention this speed boat trip?).
But for the next time, there needs to be more buzz during preparation, and the schedule should probably not point to the main holiday season.
Thank you!
We would like to thank 3m5. for the hosting, the caretaking, the ice cream and their developers, who participated in the sprint even on a tight schedule.
A shout-out goes to Macopedia Poland, who sent over three of their developers to work with us. Jörg Kummer did send himself - despite having to deal with broken hardware - awesome, you joined anyway!
The images in this article (header image excluded) were taken and provided by Julius Erler and Anja Leichsenring.
See you at the next sprint?
After a sprint is always before the next one, development will not be done anytime soon. It is enough when you are curious, and a developer who knows TYPO3. Not in depth, but enough to set up an instance for yourself, following our contribution workflow guide, and know your way around the backend of the resulting instance. Need help? No problem, join us on Slack (preferably channel typo3-cms-codesprint) and ask for guidance. We are happy to assist.
Prepared like this, you are ready to join a sprint. There is no other hurdle to take, you just need to sign up.
Information to upcoming sprints are available at typo3.org, when there is something planned. If not, there are always remote events, like the review friday. Come in and find out, what you can do as a contributor and what you will gain from the effort. Nice to meet you, see you soon?
