Doc Sprint San Francisco, April 3
The Google offices in San Francisco are nestled in a cluster of buildings the erstwhile center of the caffeine universe and the headquarters of Hills Bros. Coffee. It was here, where beans were once unloaded from ships, roasted, ground, canned, and shipped to supermarkets all over the U.S., that we attempted to apply the same level of industry to the production of more modern commodities: Web Platform Docs.
Eschewing the brown water of days gone by, we embarked with (good) coffee and breakfast in the Google cafe, which was right next to our designated conference room.
The Doc Sprint was a lot of fun...and rewarding, too! I probably gained at least five pounds, though, with all the great food. -Dan Stormont
Peter Lubbers had expertly made all the arrangements and had all of the name tags ready for participants, so getting in, grabbing a bite, and getting to work were unhindered.
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Julee Burdekin spent the day helping contributors on the CSS Properties project: Macy Wong, Carlos Araya, Heather White, Emuvente, Angela Lau, Dan Stormont, and Doug May touched 47 properties, including reviewing existing properties, adding samples, and working on new properties. The status of 32 properties was updated, including 6 moving into review, and 16 reviewed. Great work!
Other outstanding contributions: Richard Trott cranked out more small-but-indispensable edits than should be humanly possible; Tony Sukiennik, explained the WebVTT format in the audio-video API ; Jack Chi, cooked up a nice XHR example; Romain Briand translated our main page to French; Pius Uzamere pushed a lot of bits for HTML span and other elements; Linda Sager improved the Web Typography and other conceptual articles. Folks found lots to do on the site, and they chipped in some great content!
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Ryan Lane, our man at MediaWiki worked on the Evil Session Bug, made an initial site map of WPD, published the skin in Wikimedia's Gerrit, and got an initial development environment set up in Wikimedia Labs to run experiments. [Late breaking update: I dare say, it looks like Ryan fixed the infamous Evil Session Bug!!!]
After a delicious lunch (again in the Google cafe, gourmet all the way, etc.), Michael Mullaney, CEO of Sencha delivered a rousing presentation on SVG filters. (Doug Schepers is kicking himself for not being there as you read this.) Michael's presentation followed the detailed article he contributed on the SVG feColorMatrix element with several image and code examples. People use the word, "awesome" too much, yes. But Michael's contribution to WPD and the wider community is dictionary-definition awesome.
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More celebrities: Christian Heilmann came by to chat with us as we drank (Californian) beer and munched on finger foods in the Google cafe over-looking the Bay bridge. Always fun to hang out with Chris!
I am glad I participated in the Doc Sprint. It feels great to make a contribution and learn in the process! Now I'm hooked. :) -Angela Lau
We raffled off a ChromeBook, and Carlos Araya took home the prize. Congratulations, Carlos!
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Thanks to everyone who came to this event! In all we had 43 participants at the local doc sprint and several who were there in spirit via TCP/IP. Our stats are incomplete because I was only able to gather three hours of data - and if I missed your contributions in the items above, please accept my apologies.
Having great fun doing this and it's a nice feeling to contribute and being part of this exciting and important endeavor. Great lunch at Google SF campus is a cherry on top! Thanks, Google for hosting. -Linda Sager
Also, we especially thank the 20 participants who contributed their responses to our survey. These results are encouraging in that they show some improvement in this doc sprint over previous sprints, and they offer many pointers to where we can continue to up our game. Keep the feedback coming!
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So on this, the birthday of Herb Caen, champion of three-dot journalism and old-school canned brown water (that's right, Frisbeetarian that I am, I just couldn't resist a paean to Caen; for those of you who didn't grow up in San Francisco, that's why the elipses between paragraphs appear above), we humbly submit for the times yet another collaboration of Web Platform Docs, and dedicate it to Herb.