A community event: Bring your own code

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Bring your own code

Last month I started a new community event idea. It is called “Bring your own code”, and I “stole” it from what Antoine Vernois is doing in the Toulouse Software Craftsmanship Community. You can find here the event page. Tomorrow we will have the second edition that you can find here. Let’s go a bit into the mechanics of this event type.

Why

  • You have a project and you want a second opinion.
  • Your code needs improvements and you do not know where to start from.
  • You just like to show some awesome code and give it as an example.
Bring Your Own Code
Bring Your Own Code

How

  • Have a room and a projector.
  • Show the code during 15-20 minutes and state the problems you want to solve.
  • Ask the audience how they would solve the problems.
  • The facilitator would take notes about the problems and solutions that the group found.
  • Another person would show the code again. Until the time is up or everyone is done.

BYOC-Adelina

BYOC-Catalin

BYOC-Edi

Outcomes

  • The persons showing the code gets answers and some good ideas.
  • The group learns about  possible problems that might appear in some context.
  • The attendees read code written in many programming languages.
  • All in all, everyone learns.

Of course, because it was the first meeting of the it was absolutely necessary to have a retrospective. I asked the attendees to write on green post-its what they liked about the event and on pink post-its to write what and how the event could be improved. Here is the result:

600_341680382

We plan on having recurrent Bring your own code events, every month, the first Thursday of the month. The role of the facilitator will be swapped between several members of the Agile Works community, depending on the availability. So if you think it is something that might bring you value, try to attend this event or start one in your community.

While I was in Timișoara, to speak at Tabăra de Testare, the local testing community, I found out that they are starting something a bit the same, but for testers. It is called “Testing clinic”. You can read more about it here. My thought was that we could do a mixed event sometime in the future when both of the concepts grow-up enough.

It would be awesome to have developers talking about how to improve the code and testers about how to destroy it or test it better!

Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/IBM1130CopyCard.agr.jpg

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