Last night, our local Ruby programmers' group hosted its first hackfest. My employer agreed to host the hackfest in one of our (many) conference areas. Pizza was ordered. Code was written.
I had a fantastic time working with my fellow Rubyists and discussing others' approaches to our shared problem. I hope the other attendees enjoyed the experience as much as I did.
We took a page out of the Cleveland Ruby Brigade's book and chose the Randori format. These are the rules:
On the whole, we struggled to stick to the rules. Some audience members struggled to let the pair work, for example. TDD was a new experience for many in the group, and our adherence became less strict as the evening wore on.
Despite struggling to follow the rules, I found the format provided a successful framework for encouraging dialog between the group members. With additional practice, the group should gain a great deal of practical knowledge from our hackfests using this format.
The Kata, again shamelessly copied from CleRB's playbook, was a Sudoku Solver as proposed in Ruby Quiz 43.
Like CleRB, we did not leave the meeting with a working solver, but the problem was thoroughly disected and several potential strategies were debated. After much of the group had left for the evening, four of us were so enthralled that we stayed for nearly another hour.
I hope to host and attend many more Randori-style hackfests with the Reno.rb group. Everyone seemed to have a great time and the insight gained from working with such a diverse group of coders is priceless.
If you'd like to attend the next hackfest, be sure to sign up for the mailing list. I hope to see you there.