This is a guest post by Samuel Brice, DISC Committee Member, originally posted on Medium.
Acknowledgements:
- Thank you to Two Sigma for hosting DISC !
- Afshin Darian and Steve Silvester from the JupyterLab core developers team along with Diego Torres who helped facilitate.
- Reshama Shaikh organized the 2017 and 2018 WiMLDS sprints in NYC and created the scikit sprint repository. It is available for use under the MIT License.
- Thank you Robin Lee at the NY Times for helping spread the word.
Sprint Repo:
The first ever DISC Sprint was held on Friday, October 26th at Two Sigma in New York City. This is our repository for all items related to the 2018 DISC Sprint.
Advertising the Sprint:
DISC Committee members went all out to spread the word for this Sprint and the effort really paid off!
We reached out to folks across a number of different channels including dev/color, Techqueria, Taiwanese Data Professionals, and PyLadies. Even managed to include a blurb at PyData NYC during the Panel Discussion: My First Open Source Contribution.
Topping it all off with a post and Tweet by Ana from Project Jupyter we Sold Out several days before the event!
The Sprint:
About three-fourths of all participants had never contributed to open-source and overall close to half intended on submitting a PR during the sprint.
Pull Request Summary:
A total of 8 PRs were opened with 4 merged on-site, and 2 merged later on!
Windows is out there!
All kinds of thanks to Julia Meinwald for doing such a great job with logistics. Fortunately the biggest challenge of the day proved to be setting up development environments on Windows machines. Not because it was difficult but because none of the facilitators had recently used such a setup.
This is actually a major point and barrier to entry for some potential open-source contributors!
What’s Next?
Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive.
We’ll be discussing the results of this Sprint during our DISC Committee meetings and will be in touch with the community on the next event!