I came down to Bangalore few days back to attend PyCon India 2015. This event is as usual the best place to meet most of my FOSS friends in India. This time, the day 0 aka the workshop day also had dev-sprints running in the first floor of the venue.

I reached the venue around 8:50AM, after registration went straight to the breakfast place in the back. The food was good as usual. Only problem of this venue is about not having a good coffee shop nearby. The events for the day started at 9AM. When Sayan introduced dev sprints to all of the participants, most of them were first timers in PyCon and also firt timer in a dev-sprint. After all the other mentors introduced their projects, I talked about CPython.

The people who were sprinting with me were mostly very much new comers into any upstream project. So instead of solving bugs directly we spent the time explaining/learning about the process of reviewing a patch. How to start digging deep into the codebase. We took one bug with a patch (randomly), and then everyone tried to apply and test the patch as much as they could. The biggest issue was about not having a stable network connection, but we somehow managed to go through most of the steps.

In between ntoll also joined us in the sprints. It was fun to see him describing timezones using a tea cup as globe. We spent a lot of time talking to various students through out the day. Later at night we had a dinner with many of current and past dgplug summer training students.

If you are coming to PyCon today or tomorrow, please visit the Red Hat booth in the event, we will have lot of upstream contributors in the booth who can help you in jump starting your upstream contribution.