Sprinting, Jamming, and Getting Things Done
You can get a lot done when you have a bunch of people together for a brief, focused, high energy session. A few weeks back Kathy Sierra posted “Do Something Cool in 24 Hours” on the Creating Passionate Users blog. Basically she suggests getting together with a bunch of friends and setting aside 24 hours to learn something new, write a few chapters in a book, start working on a new program idea, etc. Not only that, she claims you don’t all have to work on the same thing — it still works if you get together and work on separate projects.
And since then I have been talking with some folks from the SE Michigan area about scheduling a few of these events. I think we’ll start with 18 hour sprints and see how that goes — this will let us do Saturday 10 am to midnight, and still allow everybody time to get sleep Friday and Saturday nights.
I just started ramping up with Ruby on Rails a couple months ago, and I think it would be cool to teach some people Rails, and build something at the same time. I would also like to see people get back together and work on some of the projects we got started at Saturday’s TurboGears sprint.
I’ll post more details as the idea develops.