Soon about 20 people from all parts of the region had showed up to practice TDD and learn with each other, including one guy who came all the way down from Marquette, MI just to attend. He officially got the “I traveled the furthest” award for the day. We were also joined by Ron Jeffriesand Chet Hendrickson, who had agreed to come and be my professional trouble makers for the day. Shortly after 9:00, once everyone had been sufficiently caffeinated, we decided to get started. One of the attendees had mentioned something about Corey Haines putting together aset of Cucumber features at one of the previous Code Retreats in Chicago, so some of the pairs decided to give that a whirl. After some yak shaving we managed to get through the first iteration of the morning and retrospected on what happened and continued on into the second iteration of the day.

My original plan was to just sort of float around, help facilitate, and observe everyone else pairing, however when I noticed Ron Jeffries didn’t have a pair for the second iteration, I took the opportunity to pair with him. Neither of us knew Cucumber very well, so we decided to give that a whirl. If ever you get the chance to pair with either Ron or Chet, don’t think twice about it, just do it. Ron had at one point in the day managed to – as one participant described “…[kick his] BDD mindset a bit out of place. . . “

Before we knew it, lunch was upon us. It turns out that Corey Haines was hosting another Code Retreat in Seattle that day, so we fired up Skype and greeted our fellow Code Retreaters on the west coast as they were just getting ready to start for the day. Then we all proceeded to enjoy the taco bar that had been delivered for lunch and continued to retrospect on the days events so far. When we were all finished stuffing our faces with Qdoba, Mike Sweiton and myself gave our participants a quick tour of Atomic Object HQ, showing off our open space, stoplight, CI server, and our embedded projects workbench.

Now that our food had a chance to settle, it was back to pairing for a few more iterations of Conway’s Game of Life. After one of the afternoon retrospectives, for a little bit of a distraction, we watched a video of someone implementing Conway’s Game of Life in APL. This was spawned by an email thread that circulated right before the Code Retreat about how to implement theGame of Life in a single line of APL, which still blows my mind.

Finally, by the time the end of the day had finally arrived, we had lost a few of our fellow coders and we were ready to call it a day. Those of us who were still left standing at the end of the day took a walk around the corner to The Green Well, one of the many local establishments in the Eastown area, for some much needed unwinding. We continued to retrospect on the day’s happenings over a few local microbrews and some delicious items from the menu. All in all I would have to say this was a successful Code Retreat. Everyone had a great time, we all got to pair program with some great folks we wouldn’t normally get to pair with, and – most importantly – learning happened. Though many of the Code Retreats in the past have used Java as their language of choice, in my opinion I think using Ruby for this Code Retreat was the right choice. It afforded us much less yak shaving than would have probably been necessary had we been using Java. I’m looking forward to hosting another Code Retreat later this year when the weather is a little warmer, and hopefully attending the upcoming Code Retreat being hosted in Philadelphia by Sebastian Hermida.

Since then I’ve also had the pleasure of seeing Corey Haines speak on the importance of practicing your craft through the use of Kata, or an exercise that you repeat over and over again to help develop some muscle memory in the brain of sorts.  So as I’m trying to become more comfortable and familiar with Ruby, I’ve decided to adopt EdgeCase’s Ruby Koans as my Kata.  I have already been through them once and will continue to go through them until it becomes second nature.  EdgeCase has open-sourced these RubyKoans which can be obtained on GitHub here (http://github.com/edgecase/ruby_koans/tree/master).

In the morning I got the opportunity to sit with Corey Haines and a C++ developer (whose name escapes me right now) who was trying to learn Java for a new job.  Though we didn’t get very far into the problem domain we did have some very good discussions around testing and how in this case and in most we should be testing the behavior of the class rather than trying to assert on the state it contains, as well as how much to test.

After lunch it was now time to dive into doing some Ruby, which is what I was looking forward to.  I’m starting to do more and more Ruby on the side, and this was definitlely stepping out of my comfort zone to try and improve my Ruby-fu.  We were first treated to a Kata performed by Corey Haines, just a short demonstration of the process of spec, write code, spec, write code, etc.  I could tell that many folks in the room could appreciate the lesson, but would not be able to duplicate it themselves, which I believe is something we’re going to try to improve for the next CodeRetreat.

Next it was time to start pairing on implementing some of the Game of Life in Ruby.  Chet Hendrickson had the great idea of setting some random time to work on the codebase and then when that time was up, we throw away the code and start over.  Brilliant in the fact that now we were able to “act in spite of fear” as Patrick had spoken about in the morning.  For the first round I paired with Nayan and somebody else, who again I’m horrible with names so I can’t remember who it was.  We did manage to get some working specs done in the time we had, but I feel like we spent too much time trying to decide how we were going to implement it.  Next I got the opportunity to pair with J.B. Rainsberger and a couple of other guys.

When it was all said and done, we had our retrospective and adjourned to the bar across the street.  The discussions continued into the night ending with Patrick, J.B., Corey, Dan Davis, Nayan and myself trying to solve the worlds problems.  I am looking forward to the next CodeRetreat which will hopefully be next month sometime in Cleveland, OH and the possibility that Corey may swing through Grand Rapids, MI on his pair programming tour and get the opportunity to sit and pair with him again on some Ruby stuff that I’ve been working on.