Interested in Code Retreat Philly?

[Sebastian Hermida <sebas00@gmail.com>]

A few of us are interested in having a code retreat right after the
Philly Emerging Tech conference (ETE).

What’s a code retreat? In a nutshell, it’s a day of coding practice.
You get to pair with a lot of awesome people and then go drink beer.
Too good to be true?

The goal of the retreat is to provide sessions where people can
practice doing things they wouldn't ordinarily do when working on
something they need to get finished. Since we work on a problem that
cannot be reasonable finished in 40 minutes, the tension to finish
goes away, and we can focus on different design / development
techniques. The world is open, and, since you are pairing, it makes
for a fun time trying new things.

The date would be Saturday April 10th. For bonus points, Brian Marick
of http://exampler.com fame, speaker at ETE, is going to hang around
for this.

An approximate format:
- 9:00am to 5pm
- 40 minutes iterations
- Coding is done in pairs
- Each iteration, we work on Conway’s Game of Life (http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life)
- At the end of each iteration:
  - we delete the code we wrote
  - we reflect a bit on what we did/practiced
  - we switch pairs
- At the end of the day, we go out for food and drinks and talk about
our victories.

List of open issues:
- Deciding on the programming language:
I hope we can do it in Python or Ruby. But what about other languages
you say? We need at least 6 pairs per language so we don’t end up
pairing with the same person twice. Code retreats usually have one
language, it's easier to organize that way but if we really want to
have more groups, let’s break that rule!

- The venue:
No idea where to host this yet. Any recommendations?

- Sponsorship:
Code retreats are free and sponsorship for food and venue keeps it
that way. Need to find sponsors. Any recommendations?

I have created a placeholder on the coderetreat network for this event
(http://coderetreat.ning.com/xn/detail/2712512:Event:4161?
xg_source=activity).

Register, comment, talk about it, spread the word, let’s make it
happen.

Cheers,
Sebastian