# STL CodeRetreat 2010

What an excellent event.  I can't say enough about how much I enjoyed attending
this event, due in no small part to it's excellent organizer Mario Aquino.  As 
far as physical comfort went, he secured for us great digs in the Microsoft
Offices in Creve Coeur as well as an amazingly tasty breakfast and lunch. The
attendees were good company as well, the entire day was a very relaxed, casual
affair and everyone there came to learn.

The format was very simple.  Pairs of programmers would have 40 minutes to
implement a Game of Life simulation.  After time was up there was a short break,
everyone found a new pair and sessions were repeated until the end of the day.

40 minutes hit a sweet spot for me at first.  The call to stop was ever imminent,
and so I kept my tests short, my implementations minimal and every new session I
tried to abandon some function or assumption that I had previously felt essential.

A lot of the attendees were interested in Clojure, and as it is the language of
my day job, I played tour-guide for a lot of interested and eager Clojure-
acolytes.

Clojure happend to be an excellent language to write in under a time-crunch.
With leiningen, swank-clojure and clojure.test my pair and I were writing
and executing test-cases almost as soon as a session had begun.

My day-to-day development environemnt was Emacs, which, on the other hand was
an ungodly time-sink.  Most of my pairs had worked only in vi or Eclipse.
Being able to switch my emacs keybindings quickly would have been an extremely
useful thing that I had not prepared ahead of time.  Emacs is certainly worth
taking the time to learn if you plan to do any serious lisp development, but
just about all of it's major text-editing operations, cursor movement, cut, 
copy, paste, and save took a lot of time and error.

40 minutes is not the ideal amount of time for not knowing what you're doing.
In a javascript attempt, I tried using qunit for the first time, thinking it
was javascript and only had 3 assertion methods, what could there be that I
wouldn't understand about it?  My pair and I ended up burning a lot of time
uncovering a number of such things.

There were lots of console-printed implementations.  This speaks to how time-
consuming it was to get working graphics.  Most people didn't even bother.
A lot of others attempted a html+javascript solution, which yielded some
successes, but for the most part I don't think that people were familiar 
enough with languages that are primarily focused on creating graphics.
I smacked myself on the forehead a few days later when I realized that I had 
missed the perfect opportunity to use Lua and the fantastic LÖVE library.
Ruby has shoes, and I think python has a quick-to-get-started-with graphics 
library, but I didn't hear of anyone using them.

After lunch, however, the prospect of leaving for the day before having a
working solution seemed much more pressing than the end of any individual 40 
minute session.  It was quite frustrating, and I speak for more than myself.

I heard of one team abandoning tests in favor of just seeing something work.
Which is, itself a lesson in producing software.  During the event, between
sessions, there was a lot of talk about a particularly elegant "set theory
implementation" that I think people were convinced would be a compact and
therefore quick-to-implement solution.  I spent the days following coderetreat
wrapped up in what the ultimate takeaway from the event might be.

Having read nothing more than the event's announcement e-mail, one might 
pidgeonhole the excercise as TDD propaganda.  Write tests first, keep your
implementations small and working software will magically emerge.  Working
software was in short supply Saturday.

Any of my observations above could be a lesson unto itself: keep your tools and 
your familiarity with those tools up-to-date.  Use a language that is expressive
and terse to write software fast.  The simplest approach is the best, the more
you can leave out, the faster you'll get your software working.

But there's a lot of eastern philosophy wrapped up in an event like this, Koans
and Zen and such. And there are certainly enough koans that are setups for a
easily digestible nugget of wisdom.  If you're into that sort of thing, draw your
own conclusion or one of the morsels above.  However, other koans seem to have
no lesson.  They end abruptly before the waited-for wisdom arrives, leaving
one with a sense of incompleteness or emptiness that rarely goes away quickly.

At the risk of turning this write-up into one of the obvious-moral koans,
coderetreat was worth the price of admission (utterly and completely free)
for the wisdom that never arrived, and the days I spent after it mulling over it
and writing this post, first in my head, and now here for you to read.