XPDX Sprint

I have been out of my office for all but a few days the last four weeks. Somewhere in the middle of that was the XPDX Sprint here in Portland. I was able to attend the first day. Sunday I had to cart a couple of young non-driving men to a couple of malls around town so they could conduct high school psychology experiments.

Catching up on the sprint... I missed the subsequent Tuesday night meeting where a retrospective was conducted. The notes are not making too much sense to me yet.

Here're my recollections from the Saturday... I was in California the week before and back in Oregon about 12 hours, mostly sleeping, before heading downtown to the sprint.

My initial pair was a nice, short, sweet task... we found the source of a core Python bug on Windows that had to do with marshalling and unmarshalling a foating point NaN, in this case an INF. The problem was in the C code though and we had no convenient way to build for windows. Neither did we know what behavior the Python community would want. My partner brought the problem to the sprint so he is going to follow up with the Python email list.

Another group had already split off to work the rest of the day, and the better part of Sunday as far as I know, on Line of Sight Chess. This is now a sourceforge project. LOSC was run as a mini-XP team with planning, iterations, multiple pairs, etc. It looked like fun when I dropped in on them.

Back in the other room we kind of moved around different ideas that never completely gel'd as projects. Several of us spent time getting MoinMoin installed on Windows (and Cygwin for me). Then we set about exploring how MoinMoin actions, macros, etc. work. We noticed funkiness about MM picking up changes vs. going to its cache, so a couple other folks split off and made a good start at fixing that problem when in development mode. The fix broke some other things, and one big problem was just not having the expertise around to keep us moving quickly. Our afternoon was more of a exploratory spike than a planned iteration.

Along the way several of us spent a half hour or so playing with Seaside and had fun conversations about Wiki's, AJAX, continuations, Smalltalk, Scheme, CL, and dynamic languages in general.

I thought the idea of the sprint was sound and the day was fun. For an XP focus I would want to participate more in a session like the LOSC team. Other than my initial pair the rest of the day had little to do with XP.

Oh, we were located right across the street from Good Dog, Bad Dog so lunch was tasty as we gathered outside at Pioneer Courthouse Square.