Sprints

July 18-19, 2026

Start | Breakfast at 8:00 a.m., Kickoff at 9:00 a.m.

Where | Health Sciences Education Center, 526 Delaware Street SE

What to bring | Your laptop, fully charged!

Every year, our community dedicates the last 2 days of the SciPy conference to Sprints, where we work together on open source projects to push our ecosystem forward.  You can register for a free “sprints-only” ticket to the conference and many people come *only* for the sprints.

Sprints are an informal part of the conference, where all are welcome to exchange ideas, hack on exciting projects, and create lasting connections.  All programming levels are welcome.

Many projects consider SciPy their “home” conference largely because of the opportunity to collaborate in-person at the sprints. Open source projects are run mostly on volunteer labor by the community. Because projects are shaped by their contributors, getting involved is a great way both to give back and to get your voice heard. Many projects are happy to mentor new contributors at the SciPy sprints and it can be a great way to jump into contributing to projects used by millions of scientists and researchers to enable their work.

What are sprints?

Co-working sessions led by project maintainers to fix bugs, implement optimizations, and add new features and docs. Maintainers also facilitate cross-project discussions and collaborations. Some projects run “office hours” to offer user-focused help and advice, but the focus is usually on working on the projects. On the morning of the first sprint, project maintainers will announce what they plan to work on during sprints.

What will you do as an attendee?

On the morning of the first day, participating projects will take turns announcing what kinds of tasks they will be working on and whether or not it is suitable for a new contributor to attend. Afterwards, each project will split into separate work areas with access to drinks, snacks, whiteboards, power outlets, and WiFi. Attendees are expected to self-organize to work on tasks suggested by project maintainers per their interest. Breakfast is provided but lunch and dinner are self-organized. 

Sprints are a chance to work on open source contributions just like at home, but with the ability to directly talk with maintainers in-person.

FAQ

  • Yes! Sprints are free and open to everyone no matter what your programming level of experience.  

    Sprints are a great way to add your contribution to your favorite Python libraries and packages. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, sprints are free of charge for all participants.  If you aren't sure about how you can contribute to a project, it's not a problem. We'll get you up to speed at the beginning of the sprints and we have helpers and community members willing to mentor attendees for projects advertising beginner-friendly sprints.

  • Many projects attend the sprints with the explicit intention of onboarding new contributors. If you use an open source project with a presence at SciPy and are interested in learning more about it or want to fix bugs or issues you have run into, the SciPy sprints are a perfect opportunity to try.

    Some projects will offer new contributor sessions with tasks specifically aimed at new-to-open-source contributors and they have sprints structured to guide you through the stages of a contribution.

    If you’d like to learn more about the sprints or want help getting up to speed, come to the sprints BoF on Friday. We will also have helpers at beginner-friendly sprints.

  • Some projects offer alternatives to the classic hackathon model; on the morning of sprints (and often before), projects will announce if they also offer office hours. Office hours are Q&A sessions aimed at helping you become more familiar with the project. Maintainers are happy to discuss which features of the project can work for your use case, help with debugging and troubleshooting, and provide other information about the project.

  • We won’t know the precise listing of projects at the sprints until the first day, but every year projects like NumPy, matplotlib, SciPy, xarray, Pandas, and many other projects attend, in the past two years more than 20 projects participated. This hackmd document has notes about the projects that attended the 2024 sprints and the topics they advertised the first morning.

  • Consider reaching out via a project’s normal communication channels to see whether any of the project’s developers will be at the sprints.

    If you are a developer on a project, consider persuading other developers to help run a sprint so you can work in-person together.

    Also, consider proposing your own sprint!

    Here is a checklist to evaluate if you would make a good sprint leader: 

    • Your project is open source.  

    • Your project is general enough to be useful to others in the SciPy community.  

    • Your project is ready to receive external contributions (code, documentation, ideas). 

    • You have a strong enough grasp about your project to lead newcomers.  

    If your project checks all these boxes, it’s a good candidate for a SciPy sprint. On Saturday morning, each sprint leader is given 2 to 3 minutes to pitch their package/idea to attendees.

    If you’d like to run a sprint, consider coming to the sprints BOF session on the last day of the conference to meet other sprint leaders and learn more about the sprints before committing.

  • While we’re excited about the open source work happening this summer in both Krakow and Minneapolis, we are not planning to host official global sprints at this time. That said, individual projects may choose to participate in both locations. We encourage any projects organizing joint sprints to coordinate across sites in a way that supports effective, globally distributed collaboration without duplicating effort.