It’s time for another SQO-OSS sprint, this week in London. The train is the best place for writing short and non-sensical blog entries like this one. Usually I end up traveling with Sebas and at the end of a hard-drinking week (should I be looking forward to Real Ale again?) non-sensical is the best we can come up with. Before then, though, we have a lot of hacking to do.

A good sprint has a well-defined goal and, if possible, a checklist of things to finish by the end of the sprint. For SQO-OSS this is sorely needed, as we intend to show it off at FOSDEM at the end of this month and that means our checklist has things like “make it work” and “make it pretty.” Those are lousy checklist items, actually: there’s a lot more detail that can and must go in there in order to make a sprint a success.

I’m bringing stroopwafels to the sprint; this is the currency in which I pay the other people working on the project, and there are now addicts of this Dutch confection (which my mom claims was invented by her great-uncle) in Greece, Germany, Switserland and the UK. The stroopwafel stall at the market in Nijmegen (which produces the best stroopwafels in Gelderland) doesn’t even blink anymore when I say things like “I’d like a hundred, please; I’m going to Zürich.” And so are international ties forged.

Note, though, that 100 stroopwafels lined up neatly in your baggage is likely to set off the security checks, especially if you’re also carrying a keyboard and a bunch of electrical cords in the same case.

One of the things I need to do on the train trip is switch my brain from C++ and packaging to Java again. Ow ow ow.