A Week at PyCon DC 2004 -- Day 4

Sprint Day 4 -- Tuesday, March 23

Author: David Goodger
Contact: goodger@python.org

Met two fellow PyConeers at the hostel at breakfast: Tamer Fahmy of Austria, and Andrew Gaul of the USA. We walked down to GWU together. When I introduced myself, I was asked my area of interest. I answered "Docutils," and Andrew said something like, "Oh, right! You're famous!" In a very small circle, perhaps.

Today was the last day of the Docutils sprint. As on each of the previous days, I did an architecture & code walk-through and then hacking continued. In addition to hacking, we formed a human assembly line and stuffed tote bags. Most of the sprinters present registered and received their totes and T-shirts. As a PyCon volunteer, I received a second, black "Event Staff" shirt. Good thing, too; I'd planned it that way. Brought only 6 shirts for an 8-night stay.

Lloyd Kvam joined the Docutils sprint today, and worked on The Docutils Document Tree document. (How many times can you say "doc" in a single sentence?) Reggie completed the fragment/publish_parts API. Matt, Ed & Bill, Aahz, and Ian all made progress. It's been a fun, productive four days.

Laura Creighton offered some advice. She and Jacob Hallen hadn't been able to devote a lot of time to the sprint, but would have had there been a collection of smaller tasks (bug fixes, tests, docs, etc.) prepared beforehand. Valid point; I'll have to take that into account if and when I do another sprint.

Around 7pm, Laura, Jacob, Armin Rigo, and I headed out to Georgetown for dinner at Makoto, a tiny Japanese restaurant. Laura's treat. It turns out that back when she wrote me several times asking for reST help, it was regarding the PyPy spec draft she was writing, and she felt she owed me a meal. The meal was excellent, 8 or 10 courses (lost count): sashimi, sushi, yakimono, soup, on and on.

We took a bus back, and I transferred up to Adams-Morgan. Gotta get up early tomorrow -- manning the registration desk at 8am.