Hi folks,
I've been lurking in the group for a long time, although the last time I attended a meetup was nigh-3-years ago. (You're all the reason I discovered LinuxCaffe! Which is sort of bittersweet, now.)
I'm writing because I'm co-organizing the Toronto edition of the Global Day of Coderetreat (description below.) I've run many a Coderetreat, and one of the fascinating things about it is the sheer number of people who show up and say things like "I'd like to try solving this problem in Lisp/Scala/Erlang/Clojure/Haskell/etc.". I'd love to have some people from this group coming out to represent the functional crowd!
I've pasted the announcement below -- I hope to see some of you there!
-Mike
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You are invited to attend the 2012 Global Day of Coderetreat (Toronto chapter), sponsored by Guidewire and Polar Mobile!
Where: Polar Mobile, 156 Front Street West, Suite 610 (5 min walk from Union Station!) When: Saturday, December 8th, 10am-6pm Registration: http://guestli.st/130467 Cost: FREE!
What is CodeRetreat?
Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design.
Developers engage in focused practice in pairs, working on a single problem for the whole day in 45 minute sprints. At the end of each sprint, the entire group pauses for a collective retrospective and discusses the lessons learned, before re-pairing with a new partner and starting from scratch.
This format accomplishes a couple of things: - Pairing up with a new partner for each sprint exposes you to how other developers work. - Starting from scratch in every round removes the pressure of finishing the exercise, and instead enables you to focus on moving outside of your comfort zone with your design and implementation skills.
Coderetreat is totally language- and technology-agnostic. If you feel like using your "native" language all day long, that's up to you. If you'd like to try a different language or technique each round, that's awesome too!
What is the Global Day of Coderetreat?
Global Day of Coderetreat is a world-wide event celebrating passion and software craftsmanship. Last year, over 1800 passionate software developers in 94 cities around the world spent the day practicing the craft of software development using the coderetreat format.
See http://globalday.coderetreat.org.
The average CodeRetreat size last year was 15-20 attendees. We can do better than that, Toronto! We've got room for 100 people at Polar Mobile's spacious office, and we intend to fill it!
What's for Lunch?
We'll be serving a complimentary catered lunch, courtesy of our event sponsor Guidewire! Guidewire's engineering culture upholds many of the same tenets as CodeRetreat, and we're very happy to have them as a sponsor!
About Guidewire Guidewire is a rapidly growing software product development company with a unique track record of 100% customer satisfaction. Voted #1 in the 25 Best Tech Companies to Work For the past two years, they offer an environment truly dedicated to mentorship, innovation, excellence, improvement and fulfillment.
Their commitment to Agile practices and product quality goes far beyond scrum, test-driven development, pair-programming, test automation, and continuous integration/delivery; it's in their company's DNA. Their teams are autonomous, self-managing and empowered, having clear sense of purpose and understanding of the value of their contributions. They foster a culture based on collegiality, rationality and integrity - our core values - and encourage process improvements and innovation to be driven bottom up.
Guidewire is headquartered in Foster City, California, with offices in Toronto, Beijing, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Munich, Paris, Sydney, and Tokyo. They are currently hiring software engineers with strong object oriented and Java experience for their Toronto location. Please check them out at www.guidewire.com!