Project History

Django Packages was established by Daniel and Audrey Roy Greenfeld in 2010 during the Django Dash event. At the same event, the Read the Docs project was also created. Over the years, the project has benefitted from the contributions of several individuals and has undergone substantial growth and evolution through the efforts of both open-source contributors and dedicated maintainers.

Advice for Sprints

Below are some tips for managing a successful sprint for future maintainers of this project, left behind by prior maintainers.

• Update your install documentation as your sprinters discover problems.
• Assign issues in the issue tracker to specific people. Ideally, no one should work a task unless they have had it assigned to them. This way you avoid duplication of effort.
• Tell people if they get stuck on something for 30 minutes to ask questions. We are all beginners and the hardest problems often become simple spelling mistakes when you try and explain them.
• If you have a full sprint table and a non-sprinter is sitting with you get them to contribute something small. They go from being a distraction to a valued member of the team.
• Find a way to express gratitude to your sprinters.
• If you are leading a sprint, don't expect to get any code done yourself. Your job is to help others contribute to the project.
• Go around and ask questions of your sprinters periodically. People are often too shy to come up to you but if you go up to them they'll readily ask for help.
• For sprints, show up early the first day.
• Stay in a hotel near the sprint.
• If a beginning developer asks for help, try to get your advanced sprinters to answer the questions and possibly pair with them for a while.
• Provide good and bad pull request examples.
• If someone submits a broken pull request, see if you can work out the issue with them. If the problem is not easily corrected, ask them to fix the problem and resubmit the pull request.