Sprints are back!

Hacking on Nix(OS) at OceanSprint 2021

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.

Tests & coding in the cold — the price to pay to attend a sprint during covid times

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.

Unlimited coffee and catered lunch — so we could keep on sprinting!

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.

Chatting by the pool, on a vulcano hike and over a glass of wine. 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?

One does not simply come to Lanzarote without tasting some waves ?