and how to make a sprint be effective. And of course, we have the pro to guide us through this. So first thing, Timo, tell us a bit about you so everyone knows who they are listening to. Yeah, I mean, as said, my name is Timo.

I'm in the Plone community since like, I don't know, 2009. I started my Google Summer of Codes where I became officially a part of the Plone community, I guess, but I was involved like a few days earlier. Yeah, I guess my, yeah, back in the days, I did Plone app discussion

as my first core contribution and later on REST API, then I helped with Volto a little bit. And yeah, I'm still very happy to be part of the Plone community and be active in the Plone community, even though my responsibilities as a developer slightly declined

in recent years, but yeah. You're still in charge of releasing many important packages, so you're still one of us, one developer. Glad to be here. I want to ask you, what was your first sprint experience in the Plone community

and how it was, when it was, who was there, and so on? Oh, oh my. I'm not sure if I really recall. It could have been Open Garden even. I was involved in the local Zope community back then,

so Zope was still very strong here, and I was involved in a few local meetings, I recall, but I think my first sprint was Plone Open Garden when I was doing, yeah, my Google Summer of Code

and living in Barcelona, and I went to Open Garden, and I think it was the beginning of my Google Summer of Code project, and I was super excited, but it was also really challenging

because lots of other very good developers tried to solve this problem in different ways, and I was just like, yeah, a student, right? So I went there, and I met Leonard Rieghebo, who was like super experienced Python Zope developers,

and he paired up with me, and I can still imagine how amazed I was at the way he was working because he did test-driven development, and I heard and read about that, and I wanted to do that, and I knew what a software test was and stuff, but he was sitting with me, and I think he built a prototype about commenting before,

and he was so incredibly efficient, and he was doing that, and he was doing those short iterations, and it was so much fun. I mean, I was just sitting next to him. I wasn't doing anything. I was just like watching, and I was like, oh, my God,

I'm not smart enough for this, but I want to develop like this because this is so much fun, and I learned so much from him. I'm really incredibly thankful to him for this experience, and that was the base for a Barcelona discussion, and then I went on from there and totally got hooked into test-driven development,

CI, CD, and all that stuff. So actually, that was an incredibly important milestone in my career, and I think that was my first friend, actually, yeah. So it's interesting because you're mentioning you go there as a young person

or not so experienced one, and then you pair with people that know this in and out and have been working with the technology for so long, and basically, it's free training for you, right? Yes, absolutely, and that was so amazing for me because I was at university back then,

and I never had mentors that were that high quality that I just found in the open source. I was just blown away by their knowledge and what they could give me. Yeah, that was just amazing. And then a few years after, I do remember you being the Sprint Master

for the Plon conference here in Brasilia. I'm in Brasilia right now, so it's interesting the full circle we are, and I was amazed. I've been working with Plon for quite a long time, and I was amazed how you managed to basically organize

and get things done in a Sprint with so many people. So how did that happen? How did you transition from being a Padawan to be a Jedi Master when it comes to Sprint?

Honestly, I have no clue. I guess by just watching other people and doing what they were doing. Martin Aspelli did amazing things when it comes to organizing, things in general, and other people. I never had the feeling that I sat down and thought about,

like, hey, what are you going to do? I just did what I saw other people doing, basically. It's funny that you mention the conference sprints because in my mind that was never an effort for me.

Somebody at some point pointed at me and said, you organized that thing, and I was like, yeah, sure. It's not that much work. You just go there and do a few things, and then people do things. It's not rocket science because I saw it before. And conference sprints are really open.

The main purpose of a conference sprint is to get people in. People come, and they just have fun. You make sure that people pair up and have the same experience or I try to make sure that they have the same experience that I had back then. And then it's pretty easy because we have amazing people in the community,

and you just have to give them the right environment, and then it works. Yeah, conference sprints I really like about openness. I think in my mind the first goal is not to accomplish a specific goal during a conference but just introduce people to the community, actually.

That's good. And actually it's interesting you mention that because one of the things I do remember going to my first conference in Bristol and being part of the sprints is how everyone is so welcoming. And even if things do not evolve as expected, everyone is so happy,

especially by sharing their knowledge. And then at some point you transition, right? Instead of just being the sprint master, you start organizing sprints. And then there's the whole logistics, and in a few weeks we're going to have Bezouven Sprint 2023.

That's huge. It's the biggest sprint we have outside conference. So tell me, why do you organize sprints and how much work you need to invest in there, and why do you do it? Good questions.

So I think the initial idea of organizing sprint was just that it was fun, right? I mean, I enjoyed so much working with people, right? And I just wanted to have that at our place.

And I thought, why not doing it? And I remember that doing a sprint, organizing my own sprint, or our own sprint, was indeed something that I put some thought into and where we did things a bit differently than what I saw before, right?

So the initial idea was just to invite people and have fun. But then I think when I organized the first sprint, I think I was already pretty active with Prorest API. I had a specific goal in mind, so I wanted to accomplish something, right?

So I thought that it would be beneficial for the Plone community to sit together for a while and to accomplish a specific goal. And since then, this idea, I think, developed over the years in Beethoven's Spin. So basically, every year, we sit together and think about what could be a good thing,

what could be a good goal to accomplish, because when you have so many smart people together, that's an incredible opportunity to really accomplish something. And if you can go into the same direction, it's just amazing what you can accomplish in just a few days. And when I saw this happening during the first sprints,

that when I came up with an idea, people actually showed up from all over the world and helped me accomplish this idea or this vision that I had, I was just amazed, and I put lots of effort into preparing things, right? Because that's also an important part of the sprint

that people might not see, that when you have an idea, you need to go through like tickets and make sure that you have everything prepared so that when people arrive, often people arrive and they're just there for the fun, right? So they come there because they like to hang out with the Plone community,

but often they don't have specific goals in mind, and they just enjoy working on stuff. And if you give them a bit of structure and say like, hey, we have this idea, right? Like, why don't you want to work on this maybe, right? Then they automatically like, they grab things, right? It's not like that I tell people what to do, right?

That never works, neither like not in an open source community, right? But you can make proposals, right? And everybody is, of course, free to work on whatever they want when they come to a sprint. That's the core idea. But I found out that if you provide people with a vision

and with steps that are needed to accomplish this vision, then it's pretty easy to work towards one direction. And then it's, as I said, it's amazing what you can accomplish. And over the years, I try to like continue to develop this idea. And that worked quite well, I would say, in recent years.

And we accomplish a lot when you look at Plone 6, for instance, right? I mean, most of the stuff that's in Plone 6 now has been developed during those sprints with very specific goals. That's good.

And now you're a CEO of a company, right? You say you're not a developer, even though you're better, colder than most of us. And I was CEO of a Plone company a long, long time ago, and I hosted some sprints. And one of the things I liked the most was the fact that all of a sudden

I have this bunch of smart people sitting on my office and working in something that's moving the software I use forward. And, of course, you go out for coffee or beer or pizza or whatever, and then you start talking and sharing knowledge and so on so far.

For a company, from KitConcept's point of view, being the suit of KitConcept, is it a good investment to host a sprint? I would say absolutely. But I'm not sure if it will work if you put that as a first thought.

Because at least in my mind, I try to have a clear separation between what I do as a company owner and what I do as a team or part of the community, right? And it happened to me the other day, or before Corona, like three years ago,

when we organized a few local meetups here. Actually, we hosted a BON.js sprint. We hacked on JavaScript and React here in Bonn. And people approached me after that, and they were totally new to this idea of doing the sprint.

Because in Germany, there are big companies that host hackathons now, right? And it's basically just either advertising or they're looking for people, right? So they have specific goals in mind. And when we organized this sprint here, people after that approached me and asked me, hey, team, that was lots of fun, right?

But why the hell did you do that? And I was like, oh, that's an interesting question. I guess I just like to hang around with people and hack on stuff, right? And then they asked me, but you have a company, right? I mean, are you hiring? Are you looking for people? And I was like, I started thinking, and I was like, sure. I mean, we're always looking for people, but it's not the reason why I'm here, right?

I'm here because I like to hang around with you folks and hack on stuff, right? And it never crossed my mind that this could be like, that I could use that for a company, of course, for the company. I mean, it works out every now and then, right? You can meet people and you can do networking and stuff.

So it's definitely beneficial, right? I would lie if that wouldn't be the case. But this is never my first thought. And I think that people are pretty smart and they know if somebody organizes an event for a specific goal or for their own good,

or if they organize that for the community, right? And yeah, that's important and that pays back, I think, in one way or the other, right? Yeah. In the end, I do remember when Simpli is organized, the Caffe City Sprint and then Caffeini Sprint.

For us, it was like, okay, we have all these smart people in here. We have a clear goal for the community to get something to the community. But honestly, the intangible of, oh, I have Jean Futo and Alan running, sitting and hacking on something.

It was like mind-blowing, especially because when... And that goes especially for people in Australia, New Zealand, and Africa and South America, of course. If you're not really close by to one of the development centers of Plone these days,

it's basically Europe, parts of the US. We have a bunch of developers in the US, but the US is big. We have the same thing in here. We have a bunch of developers in Brazil, but we have thousands of kilometers between us.

So if you organize a sprint, it's the chance of you to get these smart people to sit with you so you can talk without having to type like a crazy person or like Martin Aspelli because he types really fast and try to get an idea out.

So this is brilliant. And honestly, I do remember Beethoven's sprint last year. The best discussions we had about the future of Plone happened on dinners, not during the sprint itself. It's basically, oh, let's go out and let's have beers and so on. And by the way, we have Beethoven's sprint happening.

When is it? From 15th to 19th of May, if I'm not mistaken. Let me double check. I think this is it. I approved the sprint on the board, so yes. So this is a strategic sprint, meaning we need to get things done.

We are going to have close to 30 people in there. But we have other sprints coming up this year. We have on June 26th, two sprints happening. One in Ivaskila in Finland, the midsummer sprint.

It's from 26th to the end of the week. I believe it's 30. And we have one in Brazil from 26th to 28th. That's the caipirin sprint. We also are going to have the sprint in September from the ZOBE community. And we're going to have, of course, the Plone conference sprint in ABAR.

So we still have lots of in-person sprints happening this year. And it's awesome. We already had the Alpina city sprint. That was lovely. Thank you, Jens and Christina, for organizing that.

And the last question to you is, besides Beethoven's sprint, right? Because Alconqueror, it's amazing. Which was your favorite sprint and why? Oh, my, that's so hard.

Yeah, it's so hard to differentiate because conferences were amazing in Brazil, in Tokyo. San Francisco was amazing. But those were conferences, right?

Yeah, I talked about my first sprint in Open Garden. That was a really important sprint for me, as said. I also remember the sprint in Aarheim from Four Digits. That was also always lots of fun. Those were great sprints.

But to be honest, it's impossible for me to choose because, yeah, it's just always fun. We had sprints in Barcelona. It's like, yeah, no, I can't. Good. That's the best possible answer. So thank you, Timo, for sharing a bit of your history and knowledge about sprints in the problem community.

It's awesome. I still consider you the best sprint master. And I would like to invite all of you to attend the sprints in the problem community. Or if you're a company, you have the space and time to invest in hosting a sprint.

Like that old film, if you build, they will come. If you host a sprint, people will come. And it's going to be awesome. Thank you, Timo. Thanks, Ivan. And I hope all of you have an amazing world-long day.

Amazing. World-long day, everybody.