Just a short list of everything I want to spend time on
- Spending time with my wife and daughter
- Finding time to meet up with people that inspire me in proceeding with my personal goals of software craftsmanship and in the longer run business craftsmanship
- Read up on what is going on in the business and technology world around us
- Spending time with my friends roleplaying (yeah, we still do that, are we cool or what?)
- Playing some computer games, console and pc
- Just simply going out for a drink (it’s been a while)
- Play some guitar
- Do some work around the house
- Watch some movies or series
- Actually going to work and getting paid

Deciding who is important enough to fit into your agenda
I’ve noticed that I have found myself cutting down on meeting some people that used to be really close to me. Spending more time with people I just met on twitter or conferences that I attended. At first I felt really guilty for neglecting some people, but I have to admit that my focus has changed a lot these last years. I never thought I would get this focused on some of the things I’m working on right now. I still miss a couple of the people that I grew apart from, but there’s no use in trying to force ourselves to have 1 or 2 meetups each year. It feels more like an obligation than a fun night out.

Time for something new
I think the age of the 5 day / 40 hour workweek is almost over. People are asked to work on weekends, work a little during the evening, be available for customers during the night, …
Why don’t we just stop this madness of sending everyone to the office and measuring wheter or not they are there for 40 hours a week? What if we just make sure everyone can just do their job to the best of their abilities and facilitate this new way of working with and for customers?
Why not open up our schedules and forget about workdays and weekend days and just concentrate on getting our work done while having more time to ourselves to connect with other people and to enjoy the things that we really love doing? Most people laugh when I use this example, but why not try to have a society more like the one in Star Trek the next generation? Is it such a weird idea to have a society where everyone likes doing their work and get to spend 2/3 of their time pursuing personal improvement in things they really love doing?
You know what? We even might solve the whole traffic problem while we’re at it.

The setup
I did the formal welcome word for this first Belgian edition of the #coderetreat which consisted of thanking everyone for showing up and wishing everyone an inspiring day of coding. I was really surprised to see that many C# developers in the group, I hadn’t expected that. Then Corey took over and introduced us to the concept of the #coderetreat. We were going to try and solve the mystery of “The game of life” in a time box of 45 minutes. He assured us that we had no chance whatsoever of finishing our ‘solution’. That wasn’t the point anyway. The focus for that day was to write beautiful code, even if it was only 10 lines of code. These 10 lines had to be the highlight of our coding career. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, after the time box of 45 minutes we had to delete all our code. My mind went like: “Did he really just say that? We have to throw it all out? Everything we worked on this entire day was going to be deleted after each session?” And I wasn’t the only one who had some difficulty with that rule. You spend 45 minutes in deep concentration. Working together with our pair to come up with the most beautiful code ever written and then you have to delete it.

Session number 1-2-3
So I started of the first session trying to do ruby on my pair’s laptop, but his system froze after a couple of minutes. So we had to switch to C# on my machine. I was a bit disappointed because I was really curious about this whole ruby thing. It felt like about 10 minutes later Corey gave us the signal that the session had ended. We weren’t even close to a working solution. We only got some basic building blocks. We didn’t even get to the rules of the game. Most people had a hard time deleting their code, but did it anyway.
In session 2 and 3 during the morning I paired up with some different people and we started to change our point of view. Instead of starting with creating the building blocks, why not start way up high with the rules. We’ll see the building blocks evolve from there. And it actually worked way better that way. We shouldn’t be focusing on building a domain model first, which was what we had been doing in the first session. We should be focusing on the behavior of our game and get to the bottom when the need arises. I finally got the opportunity to pair up with a ruby developer and man was I surprised. Without a fancy IDE, without setting up a lot of stuff, we went straight into writing test cases, mocks and definitions of objects we were going to need for our test cases. It really feels like retro coding when in fact it is a new evolution in the way we write code. I really liked the ruby experience, so I’m going to look into that a bit further soon.

The brains needed energy
So we went for lunch after an exhilarating morning of coding like hell. We had a long lunch break, about an hour and a half. Corey insisted on this because of the work we were doing. We really needed that break to replenish our energy and to get the chance to talk to people. So we ended up talking about a lot of different subjects. Some were off topic, talking about the weather, the states and cultural differences between the countries Corey had visited during his world tour. We did of course touch some on topic stuff as well. We talked about how deleting our code actually started to feel like a relief. We didn’t have to carry it on to our next session. We could start each session with a clean slate, not worrying about the crappy code we just wrote during the previous session. It had a real liberating effect. We talked about ruby and how it is a completely different experience as the more traditional languages like C# (mental note: I really need to make some time to study some ruby).

Back to the problem at hand
In the afternoon, our approach and the way we wrote our first lines of code changed dramatically. We really started to get into the problem domain and experiment with new ways of looking at the problem. Writing test cases, writing the simplest code to pass these tests and then refactoring on green, that was the way to go. Nobody really got close to a solution, but nobody cared. We finally got to experience the joy of coding again, something that most of us had forgotten. I never saw so many happy programmers in one room. The whole setup was so inspiring. For our last session we got an extra half an hour, but even then we couldn’t finish it and nobody felt bad about it by this time.

Looking back
After the last session around 5 pm we did a round table retrospective. Most people learned that they weren’t as great as they thought and they had a lot to learn about TDD and writing beautiful code. Most of the C# and Java people said they were definitely going to look into this ruby stuff. All in all it was an awesome day and most attendants were already looking forward to the next edition in January, we’ll keep you informed.

One of the common demeanors is definitely the work environment. Most of the ‘unhappy’ that I’ve talked to work in consultancy (body shopping) and are located at the big financial institutes, energy providers or government. Most of the comments I heard were that they got zero technical flexibility and loads of command and control. Sooner or later, when you end up at one of those dinosaur companies/clients you will have to choose.

Either you become a code monkey. You just type out code without really thinking things through, without the opportunity of being creative. You don’t even think about the stuff you learned in school or at home coding away at some cool stuff. Even worse, you get into this mental state of ‘I don’t care’ and you don’t feel proud of what you produce. In the same way laborers feel and are treated in ‘traditional’ industry. I once even got the comment personally: “You are not paid to think, you are paid to write code.”

The second alternative you have is to leave it all behind. Go into the world and try to find a better place to work. Find a working environment where you can be inspired and where you have some slack to experiment with new stuff.
You can leave the high paying jobs behind and go work for smaller companies that are really dependent on creative and innovative methods, where quality of code actually still means something. Don’t get me wrong, not all small companies are like that. You can start up your own company or start working as a freelancer.

Some of the people I’ve talked to or even got the opportunity to work with, have some brilliant and fresh insights in software development. But they let themselves be downgraded to the state of uninspired code monkey. And I still can’t wrap my head around why they do this. Are we all so easily sucked into habits? Are we that easy to ‘buy’ with some higher rates or salaries that we are willing to work in any environment, as long as they pay us the big bucks?

A couple of weeks ago I spoke to one of my new colleagues about his working environment because there is a chance that I will be going to that client somewhere next spring. The only positive thing he could think of was the fact that all the windows were locked, otherwise he would have certainly have jumped somewhere the last month he was there. You know, that situation has been bugging and haunting me for all this time. Aren’t you at least partly responsible for that situation yourself? Should you allow it to go that far?

Well, for me the answer is easy, although the implementation of the answer is a bit harder: Take your life in your own hands. What if all developers take a stand and tell their companies to just shove their jobs somewhere? What if all truly inspired developers just turn their backs at this body shopping market, step out of it and move to companies that do offer a decent working environment? Could you imagine what it would be like if you could go to work with a smile on your face and really enjoy developing software again?

Don’t forget that we have one of the most spectacular jobs in the world. We get to create new stuff every day. We get to make software do things most people wouldn’t think possible. We are the basis of the technology for our and future generations. Where did we lose this truth? Where did we lose our sense of pride and inspiration? Don’t you think it’s about time we start to look at ourselves as craftsmen again?

When I arrived at the scene, first thing that I noticed was the rather small number of people there. I’m used to the Microsoft techdays and in comparison to that this was a very small crowd. I liked the fact that we were only about 70 there, that way you can have better interaction between all the attendants.

I’m not going to go through all the sessions. I just want to pick out a couple of subjects that are still lingering in my mind. We saw a lot of different tools, frameworks, to enable people to work in a Behavior Driven Development process. I must admit this was completely new to me. I know what Test Driven Development is, but I never heard of BDD. I don’t think my mind has ever been so open for anything. So I just let Gojko, Aslak, Alex and all the other presenters make their case. I sat back and tried to take in as much as I could. I think it was somewhere during the first day that I was convinced I wanted to try this methodology. I’m certainly not at the point where I want to integrate this into a large project; I don’t have the experience for this. But I am going to try it in my next in-house project.
We saw a couple of nifty tools like Cucumber (love that name), GivWenZen (love that name even more), GuiDancer (why are all these tools getting to have cool names?), JNarrate, ETA and Fitnesse. Ok, by now I know that this Fitnesse thing is nothing new; it’s been out there for some time. But I just never heard of it, I think mostly because of my biggest realization of this convention which I will elaborate on next. All these tools have a lot of merit and have a serious potential.

BDD is still a Java community thing. There was not a single piece of .Net code to be seen anywhere these two days. Looks like the .Net community is not fully in sync with this way of working yet. Do I see some opportunities here? I also found it quite easy to read Java code, although it has been at least five years since I wrote my last line of Java.
I’ve been looking for a new project to develop in-house and I think this convention gave me the correct amount of information and energy to think a bit about an open source tool for integrating this BDD into visual studio. I’m going to do some serious surfing and testing to find some open source projects out there that are already trying to do this. Maybe I can even find one which I can use as a base for my integration tool. I’ll keep you in the loop when I actually start development.

Apart from the BDD oriented talks, there were also a couple of people that shared their personal experience in working agile on all kinds of different projects: in-house, outsourced, with distributed teams, for the government (which is not easy, trust me I know. I’ve been trying to do that the last two years. But that’s a completely different story).
I liked the fact that other people were having difficulties too, I’m not the only one who has trouble trying to convince other people this agile way of working is a really good idea. I found it very interesting to hear other people asking the same questions I’ve been asking myself the last couple of months. The answer is actually rather simple to write down, a bit harder to implement. The key to an agile way of working is communication and there is no one best practice for every situation. There are a lot of different factors that you need to account for when you try to implement your own agile methodology. There is no all solving answer (except for 42 off course). There is no black dragon (thanks Gojko for this analogy) that can solve your team’s problems. You have to try things, experiment and always keep an (agile) open mind. And never forget that only by making errors you can grow and improve your way of working.

To quickly summarize: this was definitely something completely different from what I’m used to and I liked it a lot. Thanks to all the speakers for their insight, thanks to Maarten for organizing all of this and thanks to the attendees for being a part of this because after all if it weren’t for us attendees, there wouldn’t have been a convention