The 2025 Frankfurt Engineering Sprint: What did you miss?

If you have ever wondered what goes on when your friends say that they’re going on a “Business trip” abroad, then allow me to spill the beans 🫘. For those of you who attended Canonical’s Frankfurt Engineering Sprint this May, let’s recap, shall we?

My name is Nkeiruka, and I work as a Software Engineer for Canonical on the LXD-UI team. From the 11th to the 18th of May 2025, you would have found myself, my team, and about 90% of the Canonical engineers, in Frankfurt, Germany as we prepared a roadmap for the next 6 months of releases and features across our products.

Preceded by the Induction sprint introducing our New Hires, the Engineering Sprint bought Canonicool people from all over the globe to talk to one another (but this time, physically in person), learn new skills (we had a number of engineering workshops going on at any given time), and stay up to date with industry trends through morning – and evening – lightning talks.

From Mob UserTesting to Deep Dives of Design systems; in this sprint it seemed like each team had something personal to offer. I personally enjoyed the O11y workshops that I listened in on to help me have a better understanding of maintaining accessibility in my code on the fly rather than in hindsight. Others attended talks spearheading the future of React (and its working group), as well as sessions aimed at learning more about tools such as Dotrun.

The lightning talks that captured our attention in the mornings and evenings were designed to titillate and intrigue, and featured a number of different topics from mental health & “gamboling” (yes, you read that right), to overviews on modern software development tools such as Kubernetes, MAAS, Mir and Robotics (Thanks, Robotics team, we know you exist now!). I even tried my hand at a Lightning talk myself, and appeared promptly at 8:40am to deliver my presentation on Masterclasses, our in-house video-learning repository for all things wacky and wonderful where you yourself can sign up to share your knowledge too just by filling out a 30 second form.

My favourite session of the week however, was delivered by a rather entertaining and enthused Mitchell Augustin, who presented “A Fin-Tech Revolution”, documenting his foray into creating a rather unconventional new infrastructure. Complete with fishy puns, Mitchell demonstrated the end of traditional computing as we know it by pulling together a set of novelty fish to form the crux of a revolutionary new computing platform. I wonder what they would feed from, a data lake? (That was definitely me stealing his joke. You just needed to be there…).

I said it once and I’ll say it again – what a great use of free will.

After the evening lightning talks, you had a few options in front of you. Go to bed to make sure that you woke up on time to get breakfast, find dinner at a restaurant that charmed you enough to make an expense report, or head into the city center with some colleagues and friends and see where the Frankfurt train system would take you.

For me, my team and I went Axe throwing at Woodcutter Frankfurt, where I was almost immediately pulled into private training due to my lack of coordination. Below, you can find a picture of my one and only bullseye for the day, I promise it isn’t AI-generated.

When I wasn’t experiencing the food options at the hotel, I was tasting Argentinian steaks at Abacco’s Steakhouse, or trying new cuisines – such as Eritrean dishes at Im Herzen Afrikaas. 

So what’s next? Well, after the sprint, I tacked on some personal travel to my trip overseas and headed to Berlin for some much needed rest, a Secret food tour, and some exploration of the history that Berlin – and Germany as a whole – had to offer through museums such as Berlin Story Bunker. Naturally, I also spent a few days practising my inevitable digital nomad journey by working from my AirBnb. Having lost (and found!) my purse at the beginning of the sprint, I was extra careful to keep track of my belongings when I used the Priority Pass airport lounge on my home-bound stretch. By 10pm on Wednesday, I was back in bed and ready for my next adventure.

I have heard on the grapevine that whilst the next Commercial Sprint is in Germany again, the next Engineering Sprint will be in Sweden, in October. I am already mentally preparing for the weather. I hope you enjoyed this recap of what it can really be like to be a remote worker in Tech. If you’d like to learn more about Tech, Lifestyle, or Travel, follow me on LinkedIn, where I post technical blogs and thought pieces!

See you there!

– Nkeiruka