Zonky coderetreat 2017
Nov 12, 2017 · 3 minute read · Commentsrubyelmgolang
Yesterday, I attended a coderetreat organized by Zonky, specifically by Jaroslav Holaň and Dominik Moštěk. It sort of was and wasn’t a part of the Global day of coderetreat. That will take place next Saturday, November 18, 2017, and there are events all over the world. However, the day before is a public holiday here in Czech republic creating a nice extended weekend, ideal to get away from work, programming, city etc., so the attendance might have been lower.
I was a bit nervous because it was my first coderetreat ever, but it turned out great. We got to program Game of Life five times with different constraints and setups. As far as I can tell, the format didn’t differ from most coderetreats - we started with pair programming, added TDD, added ping-pong, then couldn’t use ifs and fors, and finally enjoyed a mute session.
Over the day, I got to work with six developers with very different approaches. Due to the set of languages I had prepared I ended up showcasing them most of the day and didn’t end up trying any new language myself (oh, I was so excited when I saw an Erlang sticker, or Kotlin), instead I showed Ruby to a tester, Elm to a JS developer, brushed up on Java, paired with the only other Elm developer (and we had great fun getting rid of if and case), and tried to introduce two developers to Go in a mute session with them being switched in the middle of the session (we didn’t get very far).
První krůčky s Elmem pod vedením @mingan na #CoderetreatZonky pic.twitter.com/wQyr2LL0UY
— Martin Nuc (@martin_nuc) November 11, 2017
In the final retrospective, I was surprised by how many people have never tried to practice TDD before. I can’t claim I do TDD all the time, but I strive for it whenever possible. Several people expressed doubts about sustainability and cost effectiveness of TDD in the real world, but the general spirit seemed to be positive. People enjoyed trying new things and new languages, especially Kotlin and Elm seemed like hits.
All in all, it was a great experience and I can only recommend it to any developer. Try it at least once, see how other people work, how they think about problems, how are you able to communicate your understanding to someone else. If you have time, find an event next week and participate.
Thank you to Jarda and Dominik (and everyone else who helped) for organizing the event and thank you to sponsors who made it free for attendees.
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