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Code Retreat Dublin - 17th September

25 Sep 2011

What an awesome experience to organize and participate in this event.

It was a long day but I think people enjoyed it, learned a lot and got to try a few new things.

Code Retreat. A bad picture of breakfastCode Retreat. Early birds2011-09-17 08.53.33

At 9, Jose  explained how a Code Retreat works and Kevin(below) explained Conway’s Game of Life, the problem to solve during the day.

2011-09-17 09.12.36

Sessions

A code retreat has many sessions of 45 minutes each. Below is how most of the sessions looked

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Session 1

At 9.10 am we started our first session.

Constraint: To code Conway’s Game of life in pairs.

At the beginning of the session all the pairs were talking to each other, but after 5 min or so we saw a change towards writing code.

Retrospective:

Pair count by language:

Session 2

Constraint:  To discuss the solution for 10 min, and to test drive or unit test the solution.

Retrospective:

A pair came up with a solution that used 2 lists. More people using javascript, as it’s a language that most can understand. Jasmine (BDD for Javascript) was a handy tool since you can run it in the browser.

Pair count by language:

Session 3

Constraint:  Avoid the use of primitives.

Retrospective:

In this session we got more feedback:

Pair count by language:

— Lunch Break.  Retrospective: Yay! —

Session 4

Constraint:  TDD as if you mean it tho since not everyone was comfortable with testing, it was optional.

Retrospective:  Four pairs tried TDD as if you mean it, however the concept wasn’t very clear. (this was probably my fault, as I explained it badly, sorry)

Pair count by language:

Session 5

Constraint: No conditionals

Retrospective:

The general feedback was that the pairs felt  that they were arriving at more elegant solutions with more classes, which resulted in more readable tests.

Pair count by language:

Session 6

This was the last session after a long day. The feedback on the ground was that people felt a bit frustrated that they didn’t have enough time to finish the problem; so session 6 was: Finish the problem.

There was no retrospective as people started to leave. However it felt like people left happy. Splitters!!

NOTE: There is another Code Retreat in Dublin this coming  3rd of December as part of Global Day of Code Retreat check CodingDay.org for more details

Categories:   code_retreat

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