Even though Srijan is one of the top five Drupal companies in the world in terms of the number of Acquia Certified Developers, Drupal contributions from Srijan were not that substantial.
At Drupal Camp Delhi 2015, Ashish Thakur and I from Srijan were selected as mentors. The event saw huge participation from Srijan Drupal developers. Afterwards, folks at Srijan started showing more interest in making D8 contributions.
So, we started making a plan to increase our contributions to Drupal. Ashish put together a small team of core contributors for one month—which was successful, but the results were not exactly what we were looking for. But it taught us the lesson that people are ready to contribute, provided they get a supportive environment. Soon, we started conducting code sprints and mentoring the local community.
In March we announced the First Code Sprint for the Drupal Delhi Community
It was a successful event, and we saw people showing more interest in contributing to D8 core and porting modules from D6 and D7 to D8.
This was the stage when we had good mentors and mentees working together. Ashish and I started motivating and encouraging people from different teams and companies to come and learn.
Needs more #rtbc @drupal 8 issues. @Srijan @lsheydrupal @DrupalCampDelhi pic.twitter.com/NwraqdlhIF
— Ravindra Singh (@ravindrasingh01) June 5, 2015
Later, when I was selected as a mentor for DrupalCon LA, it was an inspiration for the teams and community to contribute back to the community.
Our concept of “let’s try” gave us the idea of organizing code sprints at any time of the day. So we organized a code sprint on a Friday night, which turned out to be almost twice as productive as those held in the daytime, with twice as many people attending.
Regular code sprints encouraged and infused enthusiasm in more people. Some of them are growing very fast and contributing as much they can. Kudos to Manjit Singh for being one of the most active members and always contributing to the best of his abilities!
After seeing massive success with these code sprints, Srijan has decided to start organizing code sprints in a series (Drupal Rush in Sprints) which will be held once every month. We hope that these monthly sprints will inspire more people to collaborate and contribute back to the community.