BalaBit blog

Saturday Nucc and me were attending the Global Day of Code Retreat 2011, Budapest event (#gdcr11) invented by Corey Haines and brought to Hungary by Marton Meszaros. In short, it was great fun and I hope that little community I met that day will come together frequently.

In more detail, Coderetreat is a coding dojo based on Conway’s Game of Life. In 5 or 6 sessions, each taking 45 minutes, you write code with your pair in order to translate the rules of the game into a working software. It does not have to display the board on a shiny UI, no animation has to be rendered, making all the tests green is just enough. Knowing you must delete all the code at the end of each session and that 45 minutes is rarely enough to finish implementing the game with full test coverage (and additional constraints you are free to pick), you can concentrate on the code quality itself: encapsulation, good naming, SRP, TDD, KISS, functional programming, or whatever skills you want to practice and develop.

After each session, code is deleted and a retrospective meeting is held where everyone can tell others what was learnt and what needs improvement during future sessions. Of course, during the whole day, your social skills get improved as well: pairing with unknown people, working to solve problems together requires both of you to understand and communicate with each other.

GDCR11 was a global event: coders all around the world came together to practice writing code without deadlines, legacy code base, ever changing requirements and such, just to form communities, to meet others, and the most important: to learn.

And by learning, I don’t just mean seeing different languages and testing frameworks in action or experimenting with TDD and CleanCode principles in general, there’s way more than those. For example, by pairing with people I’d just met, I saw how hard it can be to work with me sometimes: I noticed I’m just too bull-headed sometimes to accept others people’s ideas. It was also interesting to see how others interpret rules of TDD, how big are the steps they take while writing tests and code.

It was totally worth it to attend (btw. thanks for the sponsors, Mimox and MyCorporation!), I’m sure I will be there at the next one (note that it doesn’t have to be a global event, a day of Coderetreat can be organized at any time, anywhere), and I recommend it for any developers enthusiastic about developing their professions as well!

Update: Oh, there is a Facebook page for Coderetreat@Budapest!