Three days code sprint in Hamburg
Together with my colleagues Weiye and Joachim and our two core developers Daniel and Sebastian, I took part in the Neos sprint at the end of March at sitegeist in Hamburg. For Joachim, Weiye and me it was the first code sprint and we were very excited to learn about the organization of the Neos team and how to contribute to the project.
How can we contribute?
At the beginning us three newcomers tried to find a way to get started. Where do we find work for us? Where are we needed? Is there a list of tasks that we can look at? Do I have the ability to solve one of the tasks at all?
The personal contact and ease of the core developers lowered the inhibition threshold to ask supposedly stupid questions very quickly and each of us found an issue on Github to try and solve. In most cases the right core developer was there to help. While Joachim and Weiye worked on Neos, I took a Flow task, the framework that Neos is based on.
Contribution Guide:
The starting point
Basic questions about the cooperation in the projects are explained in detail at neos.io. If you have more questions, the Neos Slack is a good starting point.
Soon we had active pull requests on Github, where we discussed our implementation with the core developers. We got to know the progress of a pull request and the testing infrastructure showed us where we could improve our code.
The feeling of accomplishment was great, when all of our tests turned green and the core developers involved in the review had given their okay. But pushing the button, which integrated our implementation into the project, left us proud and motivated to get more things done. So we did not give ourselves a rest as we were full of power to immediately grab the next task.
Contribution Guide:
How to find a task
Pending tasks and problems are documented in the issue trackers for Neos and Flow.
An introduction into pull requests can be found in the documentation of Github.
My personal success
I am especially proud of the feature I was able to implement for the Flow framework. This package allows developers to generate translation files in XLIFF format for any language. When an XLIFF file with labels for the standard language already exists, the translation files for the new languages are automatically filled with the existing labels, so that the developer only has to enter the translations.


What did we learn during the sprint?
- In a spontaneous lecture given by Sebastian Kurfürst and Bernhard Schmitt, we were taught the basics of event sourcing and CQRS - technologies which will be used in Neos in the future.
- Now we know in general how to contribute something to Neos and Flow. And I would personally recommend a sprint to everyone who find it hard to get started with Neos.
- Even the smallest contributions to the projects are valued a lot and are accepted with gratitude: From the correction of a typographical error in the documentation to translations of the labels in the backend via bugfixes and implementations of new functionalities, each contribution is helpful.
- Above all, we have been able to work with many nice people from the Neos core team as well as from our host sitegeist.
- And the last but very important lesson: There are no stupid questions!
By the way ...
Joachim has developed a Vagrant box on the basis of punkt.de's proServer before the Neos sprint. The box includes the Neos development project for simply getting started to improve Neos. This box served Joachim, Weiye and me on the sprint as a basis for our developments and is freely available for every motivated contributor.
Contribution Guide: Simply getting started
An easy was to install a development environment is given by ours Vagrant box on the basis on a punkt.de proServer.
Vagrant and VirtualBox must be installed before using the Vagrant box.
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