Koumbit gets the Drupal community involved in the first Montreal Drupal 7 code sprint

Last Friday, in a friendly atmosphere complete with free snacks, drinks, beer, and pizza, Koumbit welcomed participants to the first ever Drupal 7 code sprint in Montreal. In all, some ten Koumbit workers and almost twenty additional individuals and representatives of other local Drupal shops were present to collaborate on the development, translation, and documentation of the next version of Drupal. We hope the success of this event will encourage other companies to set aside a day in their office to host other code sprints, in Montreal and elsewhere.

Local Drupal meetups are always a great opportunity to meet and learn from other members of the community. Code sprints are even more rewarding since participants can roll up their sleeves and contribute in concrete ways to making Drupal better. Sprints are also a great way to share Drupal tips, tricks, tools, and best practices. These collaborations between competitors help contributors, and help Drupal. They make everyone better prepared to get involved.

Angie Byron (aka webchick) kicked off the code sprint by dividing the volunteers into groups based on their interests: core bugs, front-end CSS and JavaScript, Drupal 7 API changes, French translations, and unit testing. Many people ended up also working on other tasks, like reviewing new themes proposed for Drupal 7, or the Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 upgrade process. In total, the group worked on almost 30 issues in the queue, some of which can be found by searching drupal.org for the tag #d7csmtl.

Even more than the concrete results we achieved by the end of the day, we really hope this effort will motivate more people to get involved in the development of Drupal 7. Events like this help build Montreal's large and growing Drupal community, and Koumbit is proud to have played a part. We hope this event inspires others to do it again. Who's next?