Code Retreat is a community event, completely free. All you need to do is sign up, and have some developing environment setup on your laptop. Breakfast and lunch are provide, cold but hot tea/coffee is available throughout the day. The Portland event this year was held at Puppet Lab, 8:30-5. Out of the 14 who showed up, 3 attended this before, 3 left earlier, a few no-shows (these are the people you don't want to have anything to do with). Not a whole lot attraction here. In comparison, Seattle had 40+ people on the same day. Apparently more developers in Seattle.
The problem to attack Conway's Game of Life
The aim is TDD - Test Driven Development - mindset. I've actually attended one session at work led by today's instructor Matt.
There're six 1-hour sessions, each consist of 45 minute coding in pairs, and 15 minute discussion in the group. There's a survey question as the end of each session. Same question: which test did you write first in this session, and why. The first 2 sessions have no constraint other than you have to change partner. I watched with awe of someone using just vi to write code and do test in Ruby - seems a very nice setup he has. The second was in C#, which is quite generic. 3rd session: ping-pong: one writes test only, and one writes code to fulfill the test. Constrain: no communicating, nor commenting in the code. 4th session: constrain = no primitives. Only only pass object as argument. We were slow, and had a long lunch. So only one last session, which we could choose any constrain. A suggestion is no conditionals. That would be tough.
I deeply appreciate the organizer and the instructor who spent time for us. I think I'd come again, if next time there'll be more people. Because this is a paired event, the more people, the more chances of seeing something new and interesting. So, if you are reading, please join next time.
