At the end of 2011 I started organizing a coderetreat. It started on twitter around October. I’ve also posted about it in my last mini blog. The original event can be found here.
If anyone was interested, they could sign up (max 25 people) for free. All you needed to do was bring your best humor and if possible a laptop with your preferred dev environment set up. (Its not hard to organize one, check here if you’re interested)
If you want to know more about what a coderetreat is, click here. Even better: join a coderetreat somewhere near you and experience it. It is way better than just reading about it 🙂
Lets start with a management summary:
It was awesome!
It reminded me of my experience with the bowling game kata last year. Since you’re repeating the exercise over and over again, you will find different approaches. Even better, because you’re switching pairs, you will have a different mindset literally to approach the problem presented by the coderetreat. Instead of writing a bowling game, you will be working on Conway’s Game Of Life.
The most notable things of that day where:
- In the very first session we where let ‘free’. We could approach this problem how we wanted. Me and my pair where able to implement the first three rules. However we where not able to implement the fourth rule. Our design was not easy enough to revive dead cells. (gosh, this reminds me of the bowling game code kata first attempt…)
- The second session we got to choose from different constraints. I picked the “no conditionals” one, because I can get my methods under 4 lines without pain. Programming without no conditions is a whole different story though.
- The third session with ‘only check in within 2 minutes, else revert everything’ was an eye opener! It really forced you into thinking how to make all (baby) steps. Hence, I am using this at work now and it really works. I commit 10 times more often. Although I don’t make the 2 minute mark yet at work (5 minutes is easy though now).
- The fourth session was fun, as we where able to implement *all rules* (opposed to the first session), but without the code we had implemented in the first session! We totally isolated the behaviour (this session was called “tdd as if you meant it”) and it blew our minds.
Will I attend more coderetreats? You bet! Just need to take a look at the list of events and pick an appropiate one. If I attend one, I will let you know (on twitter surely, perhaps on this blog).
If you want to know how it looked like, click here to see som pictures of the coderetreat.
I loved the coderetreat, and I’ll surely organize one again in the future. I would recommend anyone who loves his profession to join a coderetreat and practice. You’ll learn new things for sure!
How hard can it be, right? 😉