Do you relate agile coding to the smell of semi-permanent markers, the look of whiteboards and the thrill of lengthy meetings? Once a year the Crate community interprets the 'sprint' concept in a different way. We lock ourselves in a lodge in the Austrian Alps for a week of coding, cooking and skiing. Developers, managers and friends close to the project spent a week in the extraordinary environment to leave the beaten path, think outside the box, and tend to pet projects waylaid during regular work.
For example Jordi, implemented and extended cr8, a set of developer tools that helps developers with converting JSON to SQL, mocking useful random sample data, and eases uploading blobs to the Crate datastore.
New Crate developer Aslan joined the team all the way from Azerbaijan to improve running a Crate cluster on top of the Mesos framework.
Integration Engineer, Haudi, dedicated his project, ctop, to all command line connoisseurs. Ctop gives you a quick overview of the state of a Crate cluster. It resembles the look and feel of well known tools like top or htop for a single Unix host, but ctop displays the load on all cluster nodes and the replication state of the cluster.
Coding is only part of the magic during snow sprint. Communication is key if team members originating from seven countries and three continents want to work together. Wether it be gathering in front of a cozy fireplace, resolving the mysteries of a coffee grinder, hiking through waist-deep snow in search of dinner at a remote alpine pasture, or taking part in a ski-jump, these experiences tie teams together.
Integrations team lead Johannes acted as chronicler and recorded and cut a three minute video of the highlights of this years snow sprint.
Are you interested in distributed, sharded, replicated and synchronized databases? Do you already contribute to the Crate project? Then make sure to sign up for next year's snow sprint in January 2017!