The Magic of Code Sprints

March 13th, 2026. The following day my friends and I were presenting our Stultus project at the Chippewa Valley Code Camp. We had a great idea, a great project, it was going to be a good time.

There was only one problem. We had basically no code written at all.

We were scheduled to give our presentation at 9:00am on Saturday. So, we naturally started working at 5:00pm on Friday.

Thus began our code sprint.

The Sprint

I'm in college, I do a lot of things. The week before the sprint I had classes, clubs, a social life, homework. But once the clock hit 5:00pm, my mind cleared and I only had one thing to focus all of my attention on. The code.

But that wasn't the best part of the sprint, I was working with three of my friends. Furious coding was broken up by jokes, music, and a midnight burrito run.

When I got tired, my friends were there. At 3am when the code I had been writing for hours still didn't work, my friends were there.

We ended up working until about 7:00 in the morning. While working 14 straight hours was hard, the fuel of putting all of my mind into one singular task surrounded by my friends made it worth it.

By the end of the code sprint, we had finished our web scrapers, designed a search algorithm from the ground up, made a web frontend, installed new database servers, set up a base Kubernetes setup, dockerized everything, and made a slideshow for the following day. It wasn't great, it wasn't pretty, but it worked. We indexed about 300,000 websites in the few hours between finishing the sprint and giving the presentation.

The Concept

The concept of working on a single problem for an extended period of time is obviously not new. The Apollo 13 ground crew had less than a day to figure out a fix for Apollo 13's CO2 filter, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin took 12 days to secretly negotiate the Camp David Accords, the Constitutional Convention lasted 4 months.

Still, I think that especially in today's world where your attention is scattered across several addictive feeds and is literally bought and sold, the feeling of letting everything go except for the one problem laid out in front of you is a valuable experience.

Us Working