Disclaimer: While I am employed by Salesforce.org, this article is written out of my own desire. All words and opinions expressed here are mine.
In July of this year, I flew to Detroit to attend my first Salesforce.org Open Source Community Sprint! Salesforce.org hosts 3 community sprints in the United States and an additional sprint in Europe every year. Nonprofit and education customers, partners, and employees of Salesforce.org all met up for 2 days of collaboration and fun in Long Beach, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Amsterdam in 2019.
So, who should go to a sprint? I would encourage anybody involved in the Salesforce ecosystem that has a desire to contribute to Salesforce.org’s nonprofit and education open-source products to attend a sprint! Sprints are the perfect opportunity for community members to come together with Salesforce employees and partners to build something great; this includes administrators, developers, project and product managers, architects, and executives.
Sprints especially need developers! There are so many fantastic ideas that come up in every sprint, yet I felt that having more developers in Detroit would have enabled some projects to see even greater progress.
Don’t believe me that a sprint is worth attending? Just check out some of the highlights below — and follow along on Twitter in 2020 with the #SFDOSprint hashtag.
Day #0: Hands-On Training
We use CumulusCI throughout our development lifecycle here at Salesforce.org. Customers and partners can use it for their own work, too! The “day #0” training was available at the 2019 sprints for folks able to come in early for an extra half-day of fun and learning.
Days #1 & #2: The Sprintin’
For the majority of the time during a sprint, sprinters are broken up into groups to work on projects. You get to choose which project(s) you want to contribute to, and you’re free to move around to other projects if you change your mind or if you want to help on multiple projects.
I chose to work on a team that wanted to build a Transfer Equivalency application on top of Salesforce.org’s Education Data Architecture. It’s still in development, but we made significant progress after only a day and a half of effort!
And while we all do a lot of hard work during a sprint, we also remember to have fun too…
Join us in 2020?
Have I convinced you to attend a sprint in 2020? Be sure to mark March 30th through April 1st on your calendar, as we’re sprintin’ in Atlanta! Registration opens in January.
— Robert