Yesterday a group of dedicated developers in Wellington and Auckland woke early on a saturday morning to help kick of the Global Day of Code Retreat in style. We came from all walks of development life, from Haskell to C#, from JavaScript to Perl, we all came together with a common goal – to practice our craft. In 6 45 minute sessions we coded Conway’s Game of Life each time with a new constraint, deleting all traces of the code afterwards.

The most interesting thing about the day was that initially there was reluctance to delete code. It was amazing to see that by the end of the day everyone was more than happy to delete their code, seeing the value on iterating on ideas to reach an awesome solution.

It was incredible to see the range of solutions people came up with to work around constraints. One pair used try – catch blocks to avoid ‘if’ statements, and another pair built an eventing system to avoid the need for return values. The diversity of solutions was great to see!

Some massive thank you’s are in order! First, to the brains behind the idea of a Code Retreat, Corey Haines Jim Hurne Alissa Conaty  and Adi Bolboaca have put in a massive amount of work to ensuring that the Global Day of Code Retreat was a success by supporting all the facilitators around the world. Secondly to our GlobalSponsors particulaly JetBrains. Locally – the day would not have been possible if not for the support of Xero ( who gave us our beautiful venue) and Mindscape ( who kept us feed on the day) Both these companies do such an amazing job at supporting the local developer community and we appreciate it so much!

Thanks to every one who came and made the day what it was.  This is  what made the day so successful. Martin and I had such a great time facilitating the event!.Can’t wait for the next one!