Global Day of Coderetreat Kalispell #GDCR18

The Global Day of Coderetreat aims to bring people together (of all experience levels) for a day of software development practice, mentoring, and fun. From their website (https://www.coderetreat.org/):

"Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of 'getting things done', the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time."

The event is held around the world in various cities and each one follows the same basic structure. That is:

• A day-long retreat consisting of 4-6 sessions
• Each session is about 45 minutes long
• The challenge will focus on Conway's Game of Life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life)
• Each session people will generally pair with a new partner
• There will be different constraints for each session
• With each new session you will start over completely from scratch
• After each session there will be a retrospective with your partner

In general you can expect to use pair programming, test-driven development, and design fundamentals to complete the challenge while programming against certain constraints (e.g. no if statements).

SCHEDULE

Snacks and lunch will be provided. The schedule will roughly be as follows:

10:00 - Welcome, introductions, explanation of the problem
10:30 - Session 1
11:15 - Retrospective / Break
11:30 - Session 2
12:15 - Retrospective / Break
12:30 - LUNCH
1:30 - Session 3
2:15 - Retrospective / Break
2:30 - Session 4
3:15 - Retrospective / Break
3:30 - Session 5
4:15 - Retrospective / Break
4:30 - Review and closing

WHAT TO BRING

A laptop, power cord, an installed IDE, and an interest to learn and practice software development fundamentals!

We'll be using the Kalispell public library's meeting room. Here's the meeting room policy: http://imagineiflibraries.com/policy/4004-meeting-room/

Per the policy, this meeting is NOT sponsored by the Flathead County Library System. I'm personally sponsoring the meetup.