Global Day of Code Retreat

A group of dedicated developers in Wellington and Auckland woke early on a Saturday morning to help kick off the Global Day of Code Retreat in style. We came from all walks of development life, from Haskell to C#, from JavaScript to Perl, and came together with a common goal: to practice our craft. In six 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. By the end of the day everyone was more than happy to delete their code, having seen the value of iterating on ideas to reach a 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; another built an eventing system to avoid the need for return values.

Thanks to Corey Haines for the idea of a Code Retreat, and to our venue and catering sponsors for supporting the local developer community. And thanks to everyone who came out and made the day what it was.