Meeting live at a sprint is something we all have missed for so long. The marketing guild did have an online sprint in 2020 and 2021 - but sitting together in person is not only much more productive - but much easier and more fun.
So we hat the chance to meet at Sebastian Helzle's office in Rheinstetten near Karlsruhe; "we" - that is Markus Günther, Sebastian Helzle, Simon Krull and Stefan Regniet. Even though we had the presumably hottest days of the year in one of the warmest regions in Germany (temperatures only went up to 38 degrees, but stayed high all night). Thanks to our wonderful hosts Sebastian and his wife Leak, we had a nice and friendly place to work, good food and achieved a lot of things.
We also had an open Slack video channel (Sebastian had a Raspberry running - very hot - for that purpose) so we had people joining remotely: Jon Uhlmann, Marc Henry Schulz, Marco Schiffmann, Andreas Freund, Christian Müller and Janek Urbitsch dropped by or even stayed for a longer period of time.
Of course we had some food sponsors - Sebastian Helzle, TechDivision and punkt.de provided us with food and drinks. Thanks!
What we planned to do
Actually we had a lot of issues to solve, but the three main areas were:
- Plan and build an official Neos Demo System
- Sponsoring in general
- Replacing the old funding API
- Work on open issues for neos.io
What we actually did
Well, we went over all those topics and could resolve some of them.
We closed a lot of issues, refactored the famous Neos.Demo package, resolved dozens of issues and launched an official Neos Demo System (beta) where users can create an account and get to know Neos without any obligation.
Here are some more details:
- We added styles to our formbuilder-forms on neos.io so that finally we might be able to use Neos forms instead of Google forms where applicable
- We refactored the frontend build for neos.io so that it is now up-to-date, and works with a much smaller footprint than before (removing the versions-timetable from the global build alone shrank it by 60%)
- We closed a lot of tiny issues on neos.io like layout problems in the footer and some z-index quirks
- We fixed the marketplace to sync faster and show the highest version instead of the latest, so you should no longer end up in and old 1.0 version when there is already 8.0 released.
- We refactored and cleaned up most components of the marketplace to make future developments easier.
- We made it possible to add awards for service providers - since adding structured data (another issue) for LocalBusinesses already gave the opportunity, that was a good fit.
- We also added a Node Structure for Sponsors; now they can be added directly on neos.io. When we have all the rendering stuff ready, they will be shown again on our Sponsorship page, but also on other places throughout the homepage.
- We set up a demo system on demo.neos.io that
- does a complete reset every Monday
- has a fusion based registration process
- separates users so that they cannot see what each other is doing
- Since the official demo system should be based on the Neos.Demo package, we had to refactor this quite a lot. So one big task accomplished was exactly that.
- We started reworking the concept & content of the Neos.Demo package after it was basically the same for almost 10 years. We will replace the content step by step in the coming months.
- We helped Simon (our most recent addition to the Neos Core team) to learn more about how to resolve open Neos issues and the inner workings of the Neos core.
Neos Demo System
Since we put a lot of effort on the Official Demo System, we want to drop some more words on that:
The best way to explain Neos is to show it - and one of the most popular pages on the whole website is "Demo". People want to try Neos - but so far we had to rely on agencies to provide demo systems.
With the new platform (hosted on flownative beach) we wanted to provide an official system for users that is open, secure and anonymous.
Since we are still working on the Neos.Demo package, we currently regard it as beta, but it is already a good start just to have a look into neos. We have some open issues (like thumbnail rendering), but most of is is running like a breeze.
Conclusions
Sprints are just great for accomplishing things and are the social glue that we used to have for a long time. Today we are more than ever deeply involved in work, family and other important daily business.
This sprint - even if small - did not only produce good results but gave us the opportunity to talk things through, paint on whiteboards and have a good interchange of ideas.
Thanks to everyone who joined!