Nephila web development

Sprint sessions in a Londoner weekend!

Last weekend was very exciting as two events were held in Potato headquarters, in Tottenham Court Road, London. Both the events took place simultaneously; Django Sprint London and Django Girls. Nephila supported both the meetings. So here is the update of the events…

The first one, Django Sprint London, is addressed to all European Django developers. Its goal is to gather Django users with different levels of knowledge. We also took part in the event writing code in collaboration with the other guests. And at the same time in the next room Django Girls event was been held. Its aim was to engage women in IT universe.

In Nephila we strongly support open source philosophy and we personally contribute to the communities of Django and Python, by producing patch for the other members. We at Nephila believe in “give and take”, so we not only take the advantage of participating in the communities but also engage and contribute to the development of the technologies.

As we said before we love writing code, but to carry out this activity in coordination with other developers is by far much better! In the first place, working in team allows to engage and brainstorm in complex problems and solutions and secondly it contributes to strengthen the relationships within the community. And, Sprint is the best place to put our hands on to experiment in writing codes.  

Of course a conference is the place where all the members of a community are willing to listen and to exchange different points of view. But sprint sessions are loved by developers too because they are designed exclusively for “hands on”, that is the real operative part. It is an excellent occasion to contribute to the growth of the community as well as the personal one. In fact, during these sessions it's possible to learn new techniques and new characteristics of Django platform.

This opening night of the Sprint session witnessed the gathering of the participants of the two events (Django Girls and Django Sprint). During this informal meeting, accompanied with snacks and drinks different members of the two communities participated and interacted.

On Sunday, people chose to work hard in the Sprint! It had been a special day, during which everyone has been involved to improve Django platform, djangoproject.com website and the application Django Rest Framework. Even though participants had different levels of experience, the best feature of this sprint was strong cooperation spirit. During the sprint some Django core developer helped the participantswith guides, introductions and along with initiating mentoring activities.

Similarly, Django Girls workshop, designed to introduce women to Django and Python programming, was characterized by a strong cooperation mood too. In our opinion this workshop is the perfect place for strangers to meet and collaborate. Our hope is that more and more women will get involved in Django in the future!