Back in early 2010’s, “sprints” were how I lived. Week-long events, in random places around the World, hacking on open source. From offices in European cities, to lake sides, castles and saunas. It’s where I met some of my best friends, where I got business for Niteo’s agency side. It’s where I learned more than any university could teach me. And finally, it’s where I had unimaginable amounts of fun.
But as the years flew by, I started feeling the downsides of constant traveling & hotel food. My health
started declining. Every sprint came with a nagging feel that, yes, it was fun, but it was taking it’s toll.
Then I became a father. And that nagging feeling increased by a ten-fold. Every time I went away, I felt bad for not being around.
I stopped organizing sprints. I almost stopped attending them. One in a year, maybe.
“… and then you have to shove the swab into your brain. You know, like Nix.” 
I missed them, though, dearly. I felt like I wasn’t learning as much as I did in the past, that I was falling
behind. I remembered the early days, when I was daydreaming that one day, I’m gonna have a villa by the beach, and
throw sprints there. It was gonna be so awesome! One day, I’ll get there …
The real impact of Covid isn’t really that it changes things, but that it pulls the future forward. For about a decade or so. And it pulled my dream forward too! Back in May we bought a house on the Atlantic with the idea of renting it out to remote teams and to organize the occasional sprint or two.
My dreams have now become reality. Last week we held the first sprint in Niteo House: the OceanSprint. I
won’t go into details of how productive it was — others wrote reports about it — I’ll let the
photos tell the story.
But I will say this: there will be more to come! By having the sprint in our house, I had all my stuff there to minimize the downsides of running the sprint:
- catering that prepared healthy food with a full kitchen to prepare nutritious snacks
- a good bed so I could wake up without a sore back
- yoga mats and bands for an afternoon stretch after a full day of sitting
- my favorite beach just a few steps away — I could sneak out for a quick (wind)surf in the morning and then fool around in the shore-break with fellow sprinters in the afternoon
- and finally, my family was just a few minutes away, I could go hang out every day for an hour or so.
“Wow look at this barren landscape. Resembles the path to learning Nix.”
– “All the trees you can see
is the available documentation”
Oh, this was Spain, remember? Dinners were delightful!
In a nutshell: I got all of the good parts of a sprint (learning, relationships, fun) and none of the bad! This
was such a success that I’m quite sure I wanna do this more often. Very often. How does March 2022 sound?
