PyCon 2011 CPython Sprint Newcomers

Following up two tutorial and summit days, then three days of the conference, the sprints got off to a great start on Sunday evening. I'm back at home now but wanted to put together a summary of the first two days: A lot of great projects got up on stage to pitch their sprint ideas including Brett Cannon speaking for CPython, letting people know where the sprint would be, mentioning the "dev-in-a-box" CDs, and encouraging people to come out and hack. Within 15 minutes of the end of announcements, we had 7 first-time sprinters eager to dive in and get going right away. The new developer guide was instrumental in getting everyone through the initial setup. The plan was to get a Mercurial checkout and coverage.py as a starting point, as one of the suggested sprint targets was increasing test coverage. By 6:30 on the first day, we were up to 9 people fully up and running, pouring over the coverage results (which were handily pre-generated on the "dev-in-a-box" CD), and diving into code. Here's what everyone worked on:

• Alicia Arlen started tackling the expansion of string tests and got a patch written and checked in within first day.
• Scott Wilson noticed some failing urllib tests on his Mac and got to work on fixing them. After that he started on increasing urllib test coverage.
• Denver Coneybeare mentioned a dbm patch he made a few days before the sprint, then got it reviewed and checked in. He followed that up with test coverage patches to fileinput and _dummy_thread.
• Jeff Ramnani came up with several documentation and code changes, along with some tracker triage to get a few older issues closed.
• Michael Henry spent some time on the email package, including some documentation updates and a port of test_email_codecs to Python 3. He's also working on timeit test coverage.
• Natalia Bidart noticed several test failures after the initial build and test, then wrote up a few patches to make sure her configuration passes all of the tests. She's also working on logging test coverage.
• Matias Bordese read the dev guide pretty closely and patched a step that didn't jive with his system. He's currently expanding coverage of the dis module.
• Robbie Clemons started by reviewing a few issues, then took cgitb up to 75% test coverage by starting a test suite for it.
• Evan Dandrea came up with patches to posixpath, shutil, and tarfile for test coverage and a few bugs.
• Jonathan Hartley looked into a unittest issue and wrote up a fix plus tests that got checked in pretty quickly. He's also working on site.py coverage.
• Piotr Kaspyrzyk used a tool he made to find typos in his research work and applied it to the Python documentation, coming up with several patches and many more on the way.
• Tim Lesher spent time investigating a pydoc issue that was being discussed on the mailing list about named tuples
• Brandon Craig Rhodes started by running coverage and ended up diving into the order of imports on interpreter startup to fix coverage results before going further with them. He took the new results and is working on copy test coverage.

Here's a picture of some of the group, hard at work: Many thanks to those listed and everyone else who came out to sprint. Hopefully you learned something new and had a fun time contributing -- the effort is definitely appreciated and we look forward to working with you in the future!