archipelago-sprint

Andi and I shared the same flight back to Berlin and spent a night in Oslo at the place of — let me get this straight — “the brother of a friend of his girl friend”, who neither of us had met before. After realising, though, that going into Oslo meant a two-hour train ride in from Plone Solutions offices and a two hour bus ride back out to Torp Airport the next day I began to doubt, whether it would be worth the effort. Fortunately, our host Karsten turned out to be a really good tour guide who even drove us in his car out (and up!) to the Holmenkollen and back into town explaining everything on the way. I don’t think it would have been possible to see and learn about more of Oslo in such short time. And except for the numerous and humongous pot holes and steep prices Oslo seems to be really an altogether agreeable city. Somehow Oslo present itself to my mind as a mixture between (of all places!) Stuttgart and Seattle…

And finally — if for no other reason than to demonstrate the astuteness of this author’s observational faculties — it seems that the Norwegians are really into expectation management: not only do the signs for the toilets at the central bus terminal include the distance in meters but the pedestrian traffic lights outside the station count down the seconds remaining until switching to red ;-)

Since my last entry I’ve finally managed to get up to speed with my sprint project (hence the lack of blogging). Wading knee-deep through the Archetypes sources looking for the right place to hook into for setting the default content type, I was really glad to have such experienced tour-guides at my disposal. Nonetheless, in the end I was pretty relieved to be able to give a small demo of my endeavours on the evening of the last day — I had wired the final bits literally just five minutes prior to the wrapup-meeting ;-)

So while it really doesn’t exactly speak for the architecture of Archetypes that it took two days and a room full of Plone veterans to complete a PLIP of such humble scope I can say in it’s defence, that once I had everything sorted out it took only 20 additional minutes to add Textile support, as well — including tests…

Once I’m back home I’ll still add some additional tests and expose the ZMI properties to the Plone control panel. An additional feature that could be useful would be to enable users to override the site default with their own personal preference, similar to how it’s already being handled with features such as enabling external editor or skin switching.

All in all this sprint has been terrific. Many thanks to Geir from Plone Solutions for organizing everything and being the “Sprint Daddy” for all of us ;-) But also a big thank you to all of the co-sprinters - simply everybody helped make this fun and productive. I’m definitely looking forward to the next conference or sprint!

The weather is getting worse, the atmosphere is getting better ;-) Everybody is noticably more relaxed now that we’ve settled in - both in regards to the island and in regards to everybody having found a project. Personally, I’m happily chugging along and learning heaps of stuff about Archetypes, PortalTransforms and writing unit tests. I’ve now got working Markdown support for ATDocument, yay! Of course, it’s all hardwired, so the next step will be to hook it up to control panels and Zope3 utils. But in the meantime, I’ll attend to more social activities ;-)

Apart from helping Andi and Godefroid setting up the SVK-Mirror, playing table-tennis at the local gym hall and generally just having a grand time I’ve started doing some actual work today (hear, hear!). Together with Christian Scholz I’ve begun writing and working on PLIP #149 Improved Markup Support (may not be available publicly as I post this – we’ll have to see, how syncing our offline copy of plone’s documentation to the ‘live’ instance at plone.org will work out.)

While this PLIP is certainly not as ‘sexy’ as all the UI and AJAX stuff that’s mainly going on here it does have the big advantage that by working on it I’m scratching my own proverbial itch: I’m writing all my texts (including blog entries) using Markdown and/or Textile (in TextMate, of course) and am desperately looking forward to not having to manually convert them to XHTML before posting them.

Oh, and Skype Out rocks so hard..! I had to be away from my family in a foreign country to really get why skype is so cool...

So, the sprint is now officially underway and it’s immediately clear to me, that this will be a whole lot more structured and organized than the snow sprint ;-) Which I’m actually glad about, to be honest. Today will be largely spent assessing which PLIPs should be addressed and to form groups to work on them.

The weather is not great but nobody really minds – the atmosphere is great, anyway ;-)

ATM I’m with Andi, Balazs, Hanno and Godefroid at the tower (which has internet connectivity) where we (okay, they) are trying to set up an SVK mirror which will then be updated regularily via SneakerNet™.

Waiting to board the plane that will take me to Copenhagen (en route to the Archipelago Sprint) I’m finally presented with the time and opportunity to blog again. This, of course, implies that I’ve been rather busy during the past weeks with paying-for-the-rent-work, being a family father and (meekly) attempting to uphold something that at least resembles a social life. Unsurprisingly, this left little resources for being a geek – and consequently no fodder for this blog.

Well, all of that is about to change, as I’m about to take part in my second plone sprint: job and family related duties will be temporarily suspended and social life and geekdom will enjoy a week long confluence, yay!

Judging by last sprint I took part in I’m probably in for a really good time – all the more likely since this time local co-plonista Andi will be there, too.

Last time being my first sprint as well as my first exposure to Zope3 technologies, I had spent the first three, four days just trying to wrap my head around all the new stuff and didn’t really manage to bring the project we had begun to any form of conclusion. And never managed to do so since, due to aforementioned constraints. Not so this time, where I can dive right in. I’m fairly confident, that using Zope3 goodies such as adapters, views and interfaces will become second nature by the end of this week…