The Neembadi sprint offered a refreshing experience, starting right from Pune airport where I reconnected with fellow T4D colleagues. Upon landing in Ahmedabad, the atmosphere continued to be warm with more greetings and conversations during the bus ride. Neembadi itself was deeply connected to nature, with the sounds of peacocks making the place feel homely. Over two days, the schedule included various activities, from sightseeing to secret santa to enjoying an authentic Gujarati dinner, which provided a great glimpse into the local culture
On a personal level, I truly valued the time spent with everyone. Sharing different experiences and engaging in diverse conversations created some wonderful and lasting memories.
Highlights of Sprint for me
Time Management session by Radhika and Krishna
The session was truly insightful, providing answers to many persistent questions. It began by introducing the ‘Prioritize → Plan → Protect‘ triangle, a concept that prompted us to re-evaluate our current routines.We also explored the Eisenhower Matrix. The structure presented was new to me, and the key takeaway was the importance of using it to categorize my tasks. Crucially, the main lesson was to integrate my personal and professional planning. Previously, I would defer personal planning to Saturdays and Sundays, which often left me feeling overwhelmed.
Team Building Session with Gagan Sethi
The session with Gagan Sethi was not an ordinary team building session; honestly, it felt like a lot of wisdom was to be learned from his every statement. We did a little activity where three people as a team were assigned to build blocks with some rules, and at the end of 3 rounds of the activity, we ourselves found a lot of difference in how we sometimes question our own capability—not because we can’t achieve the goal, but out of fear or guilt, we just step ourselves back.
The line from him that really stayed with me was, “The more you are in touch with yourself, the more you are in teams.”
FCxO Hackathon
During the FCxO Hackathon, we presented a use case under the SEARCH organization where we built a program management system on the Frappe platform. While the solution met the functional requirements and worked well during the demo, the process of showcasing it became a moment of reflection for me as an engineer. I realized that in my eagerness to move fast, I had directly jumped into creating DocTypes at the site level instead of first structuring the solution as a custom Frappe app.
This approach helped with rapid prototyping but introduced clear limitations. Because the DocTypes and configurations were not bundled within an app, the system was tightly coupled to a single site. This made reuse, version control, and migration to another environment or repository unnecessarily complex. Stepping back, it became clear that starting with an app-first mindset would have provided cleaner boundaries for schema, business logic, and future enhancements.
To improvise, we began exporting the existing DocTypes as fixtures and integrating them into a custom app. This exercise itself was a learning experience , it reinforced how Frappe’s app architecture is designed to promote modularity, portability, and long-term maintainability. More importantly, it shifted my perspective from “making it work quickly” to “designing it to scale.” The hackathon ultimately became not just a delivery milestone, but a valuable lesson in architectural discipline and intentional system design.
At Last this sprint was particularly memorable for me. I had the opportunity to perform a solo dance after a long time and also got to sing one of my favorite songs amidst birthday celebrations. The sprint concluded perfectly with a Garba night on the last day.
By Sakshi Raut
