On Friday, I decided to plan a sprint for the weekend. It required a little more coordination than I originally expected. With the developers strewn from Finland and Poland, to the UK, to Maryland, and finally, myself, in good ol' -7 GMT, there's a 9 hour difference. This required me to get up quite early on Saturday, and spend a whole weekend hacking on Entertainer.

After a whole weekend working with two other developers, and very good up-and-coming developer/tester, and the occasional testers dropping into the IRC channel to say hi, file a bug, and then leave, we got a lot accomplished. I was finally able to complete a working VideoThumbnailer class (which meant reading every gstreamer doc, and tons of blogs, and still learning from trial and error). Joshua Scotton was able to complete the news reader portions, with support for Liferea feeds, etc. Lauri has successfully written cd playback, and is hoping to get DVD playback in soon. We also now have 10x the tests than we had on Friday evening (from 4 to 41), with all but two passing, and four of which were tests that revealed bugs (and the two that aren't passing are among them). A total of 1,728 new lines of code were introduced into the codebase, over 25 commits. Documentation was updated and confirmed to be detailed. 10 new bugs were filed, and 7 reported bugs were closed. A large amount of code was refactored using our newfangled test framework, and we were able to find a few issues with architecture and coding practices, optimizing as we went.

Overall, the sprint was an absolute success. We were able to talk to eachother, and determine what was required for a 0.1 "preview" release, and what we could push off for another version. I made some great progress on converting all of our current ASCII string data to UTF-8, although there is still a bit of room for improvement (and I'll be working on that off-and-on for the next while).

I'm hoping that we can sprint once a month on Entertainer, and really get a neat, polished app soon.