Code and Beer
I wanted for a long time to organize a gathering of programmers where anyone can come and go whenever they please. One year ago I read about the “Code & Coffee” and the “Code & Beer” events that happen in the world, but I was more familiar with the ones in USA and UK. Because I do not drink coffee, and because it’s reaaaally hard to meet-up with someone living in Bucharest at 7:00 AM, I decided to try the “Code and Beer” experience.
The first thing I did was to ask Sandro Mancuso, the amazing force behind the London Software Craftsmanship Community, to help me a bit to organize the first Code & Beer. He gave me some good advices: give a quick intro about the group and future events, start with quick introductions during which people say what they want to do (pet project, kata, just have a drink and decide later), ask if any one wants to give lightning talks, encourage people to pair, enjoy the evening.
So I wrote this description on the AgileWorks community website. It is not the best one, but it was something to start with. After the first “Code and Beer” I changed it with this description.
I made reservations at a Pub for 14 people, even though we had 18 people registered. I arrived there a couple of minutes late and there were only 4 guys waiting for me. I said we should wait a bit for the others, which is annoying, a couple more came and I started to do the ritual Sandro taught me 🙂
The first surprise was that only two of 3 people had a laptop on them (one of them was me). It seemed that chatting and having a beer was the preferred way of spending the evening.
For me it was a really good timing to repair my Eclipse installation on Ubuntu. I needed to delete all the installation files. In the process I learned how to delete files in bash using a regular expression. Nice stuff, I really think it is very useful. Many thanks to Dan Serban for teaching me this simple and useful tool.
Nevertheless, even if there was not a lot of coding going on, we had a good exchange of knowledge and ideas, some of which you can see in the comments of the meet-up here. All in all I think it was a successful event, which does not need a lot of attention, or energy. You just need to know how many people will come and to make reservations to a pub. Then, everyone will know what to do 😉
So, because the first edition was a success, “Code and Beer” will happen in Bucharest on Tuesday, every two weeks.
Many thanks to Corey and Sandro for giving me this idea of informal and free of schedule gathering.
