Coderetreat @ gameduell
What a sunny saturday morning! Just leave the family at home, take the bike and go to … a coderetreat! What? I’ve got the invitation to “work” this saturday (april fools day) from a friend some weeks ago and I must say I don’t regret it. The definition of a coderetreat is:
Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design.
At 9 o’clock nearly 20 developers met in the (really nice) offices of a game company in Berlin to start practicing with just one goal: implementing the “Pacman”. The fun starts with the people. You should know that the mix of different qualifications that the participants represents is very welcome at such an event and it doesn’t mean just different languages!!! BTW – there were some Java-guys, some Python-speaking-people, C++, some polish ones, a russian and even a SmallTalk-Fan. It means differences in practical knowledge as well. May be half of the attendees were (professional) developers and the other half consisted of interested persons from other areas like graphic design or project management – I saw a kid too.
Coderetreat is a day-long, nice practice event, where you’ll meet interesting people, get usable insights from each other and learn many new things.
After a short introduction – so that everybody knows each other – the rules were made:
- Teams - a team consists of two – one of the goals is to get some experience (or first contact) to pair programming techniques and it’s obvious that you’ll learn much more from the resulting discussions with your teammate as from the task itself.
- Sessions - it is not possible to implement the whole game with two people (with a different skill set) in a day, so we need just some parts or a scaffold-like (but working) implementation of some concepts focused on a specific task.
- Timeout – All teams got a specific amount of time for each task (or session). This can vary between tasks (but 45 minutes seems to be a good average). Fun Fact: immediatly after timeout all results will be wiped and all teams take part at a retrospective discussion.
- Switch – Switch your teammate after each session!
With nearly an hour for one session including the retrospective there was time for 6 or 7 sessions with different tasks and an increasing level (of results, discussions, experience, training, …). Central theme of the first two or three sessions were pair-programming and test-driven-development. Personally I really liked the insight how other people behave in the situation when they became navigator and the experience to work with an other (non-preferred) language.
After further discussions at the lunch break Chili was nice too the tasks changed and got very interesting. Implementing pacman w/o if-statements or just without loops in an unfamiliar environment and a short time range can get a brainbreaker but has a lot of fun.
At the end all participants gathered to reflect about the day and the experiences they made. Many thanks for this event to @codecopkofler and @martinklose