Git Sprint Weekend @ Bloomberg London

Bloomberg’s Engineering team in London recently hosted a fun weekend of hacking to benefit the Git community. More than 30 developers spent time on Saturday and Sunday, November 11-12, developing patches for git (a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy) and libgit2. To date, five libgit2 patches have already been merged (the two co-maintainers of the library were present). Another seven patches are being reviewed, while additional patches are still in progress.

According to core Git member Jeff King (aka Peff), who served as one of the mentors at the event, the sprint exceeded all expectations: “We got several patches out of the weekend. But, more importantly, we got more people comfortable with contributing to open source and to Git. I hope the experience will keep them in the community, whether they end up working on Git or another open source project. It was also a unique experience to see people contributing to Git for the first time. We learned where some of the pain points were for first-time contributors in a way that would have been hard to see online.”

The Bloomberg engineers that participated in the event earned approximately 150 volunteer hours towards the company’s philanthropic contributions.

Bloomberg thanks Git contributors Edward Thomson, Christian Couder and Peff for serving as mentors at the event, as well as Bloomberg engineer Henry Kleynhans for organizing the weekend.