Sunday, December 9, 2012

Global Day of Code Retreat 2012

Last year I was in the Global Day of Code Retreat in Barcelona, held in Runroom (their former office), organized by Agile-Barcelona and facilitated by Jaume Jornet. It was a great experience, and I learned a lot, not only about programming, but about teamwork and sharing.
This year the event was planned again in Runroom, but for difficult dates: public holidays and the Barcelona Developers Conference were difficult rivals. And this time I was a facilitator.

I agreed to co-facilitate the event with José E. Rodríguez Huerta and I joined the facilitators group and attended a training using Google Hangout. In the training we were people form New Zeland, Sweden and Australia, with an amazing trainer: Jim Hurne. The organization of the event, the sessions, the connections with other cities, and the focus of the exercises were all good lessons.

Then I started contacting with the groups around Spain that were having the same event to organize live connections.

Everybody was distilling an energy that was impossible to not be infected.

The day of the event 11 guys showed up in Barcelona (30 had confirmed), and we opened a Hangout during all day so we could be chatting with other cities. Valencia (Ricardo), Madrid (Juanma), Bilbao (Jorge), Berlin (Greg) and Viena (Michael) were some of our connections. We followed the schedule and had sessions with interesting restrictions (ping pong, no conditional, ask don't tell,...) and the programmers used Ruby, C#, Python, Java, C++ and JavaScript.

The retrospective was interesting. They suggested:

  • Having a retrospective reviewing the code someone has writer
  • Choose a language to use everybody in some iterations (and learn the basics of language beforehand)
  • Try a randori, maybe with this language.
  • More on legacy code.
  • And choose a cool mechanism for the raffle 


Out of their confort zone. No pressure for getting the problem done. Try new things. Pair with new people. Thinking in a different way.


This crazy idea from Corey Haines deserves my respect. So many people crazy to become better professionals. And having fun.

Big Thank You.

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