Gusty doc sprint at UW in Seattle

What do you get when you mix WebPlatform Docs, University of Washington, Western Washington University, W3C spec editors, web developers of all levels, a winter storm with gale-force winds, loss of power to 20,000 Seattleites, and a few bowling lanes? The second Seattle Doc Sprint, of course.

University of Washington entrance

This past Saturday, Microsoft hosted a doc sprint at the University of Washington. This was another successful mingling of WPD community members, coming together to beef up the content portfolio we maintain. We specifically reached out to students at UW and at Western Washington University (and bravo to those who made that two-hour trip, given the horrendous weather) to create a mix of people who are still learning and those who are actively practicing web development. All-in-all, about 45 people met in the Husky Union Building (the HUB). We kicked off the day with delicious Italian pastries and good strong coffee, and then got right to it. We had great energy in the room, and it showed in what we accomplished.

Doug Schepers’ talk, delivered from the East coast via Skype, kicked things off. Doug talked about the importance of the project, and more poignantly, why it was a good idea for everyone to give up their Saturday and venture out in the storm. After Doug’s talk, I gave some quick background about WebPlatform (you can see the slides on my share) and what we were working on. Then Alan Stearns spoke about what’s happening in CSS, how to edit a CSS property page, and where to get help for editing MediaWiki. Then, we were off to the races.

We had only a few goals for the sprint:

Review CSS property pages that have been marked as done

Review HTML element pages

But that was plenty! The low-hanging fruit were the pages that just plain looked good, and we found a lot of those. Others were missing a value or example. Some needed just a tad of editing. In reviewing the pages, some contributors felt more comfortable marking down in notes what needed further work, some ran into issues in creating content, but most just hit the edit button and just went for it.

Working at the doc sprint with various levels of success

The HTML elements were a little more uneven. Some of the pages have received a great deal of love and looked bellisimo! We gave some other pages a little extra TLC, in order to make them as beautiful as that first set. And there were times when working on some of the elements required working on some attribute pages as well, so we did that, too (thanks, apexskier!).

A big shout out to all who attended and took part in the doc sprint. This was a ridiculously hard working group of contributors. I practically had to beg everyone to break for lunch. When all was said and done, these hard-working souls reviewed, edited, created, and curated 201 topics by the end of the day, an astounding amount! We all were rewarded by the knowledge that we did a lot of good work. And everyone who participated was further rewarded with a WebPlatform t-shirt and John Allsopp’s book, “Developing with web standards.” And one fellow with abundant good fortune won a Microsoft Surface Pro.

Winner of the Surface Pro

We’re looking forward to more doc sprints both here in the Puget Sound region and around the world! And in case you were wondering, no, we did not lose power on campus.

Special thanks to Alan Stearns of Adobe and David Storey, our local CSS and WebPlatform gurus, who tirelessly roamed the room and answered questions about HTML, SQL blocks, CSS, what makes good pizza, and many other topics.

[caption id="attachment_796" align="alignnone" width="576"] Post-doc sprint bowling in UW's HUB[/caption]