Another Journeyman Week

Recently I had the chance to accompany one of my fellow Craftsman to his work and immediately agreed to do so. While my own Code Cop Pair Programming Tour finished in 2013 I am still enthusiastic about being on tour. In the spirit of documenting my previous 13 weeks, I consider these past days to be week number 14 of my (probably never ending) Code Cop Tour ;-)

Global Day of Coderetreat 2015
To improve my facilitation skills, I ask facilitators to run trainings together with me. My friend Carlos Blé agreed to host me for a Code Retreat and I ended in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria for the Global Day of Coderetreat 2015. I recommend Gran Canaria for GDCR because the weather was much nicer than in Austria during mid-November.

For the Code Retreat itself I proposed to have a specific focus, a theme that we would use to shape the day. Carlos selected Object Orientated Design and we built the whole day around it. We started the day with a (very) short introduction - probably more a summary - of basic object oriented design principles. During the day we only used design centric constraints like No Naked Primitives or Tell Don't Ask. I was concerned that some people would like to try functional programming and indeed there was one participant working in Clojure in all sessions. But he did not complain and tried to fulfil the constraints, which was certainly a great exercise, even when using functional paradigms. We also asked participants to use Test Driven Development and pair programming, but we did not stress these topics. By making the Code Retreat more focused, we were able to exercise a single topic more in depth.

Besides from copying Carlos' every move, I learned a lot from the changed setting. I was a guest and knew nothing about how the Craftsmanship group of Gran Canaria and their Code Retreats. Further I had trouble communicating clearly and talked too fast for the Spanish participants. In return I did not get much feedback because I had not communicated well - which left me confused and made me sweat. I cannot remember feeling that exposed. The whole setting proved to be very challenging, exactly what I had been looking for.

Ruben wrote a summary of the day, which saved me from writing it myself. The slides Carlos and I used are available here.

AIDA Canaries
Because I "happened" to be around, Carlos invited me to spend a few days with his current client, AIDA, probably the largest IT company native to the island of Gran Canaria. I spend three days mob programming with Carlos, Emilio Medina and Ronny Ancorini. I used the opportunity to improve my C#, which I had not used since my session with Paul two years ago. I learned some more things about C# and ReSharper. We worked long hours and I did not see much of Gran Canaria during these days. As I had not come as a tourist, I did not mind.

Carlos published his summary of my visit already, which saved me a lot of typing again. (It seems that it pays off that my post is a month late ;-) I really loved staying some days in AIDA, everybody was nice and very inclusive. While a few employees had problems talking English, everybody seemed to appreciate my visit and the discussions I started. I enjoyed my time there. Thank you!

Spontaneous Unconference on Functional Programming
The following Friday I was lucky to meet Nicole Rauch. She had come to Vienna for her talk at the Agile Tour Vienna. She was one day early and we took the opportunity to spend the day together. While I had planned to host her, my friend Görge Albrecht, the "Code Mentor", stepped up and did the extra work of really organising the day, getting the necessary infrastructure and even paid for drinks and lunch. (Thank you Görge, I owe you.) The Software Craftsmen GmbH helped us out with their meeting room and shared their office with us for a day. The Software Craftsmen are a young company of experienced but still enthusiastic software professionals.

So a few members of the Vienna Craftsmanship group came together to discuss, share and exchange knowledge with Nicole. In the morning we collected possible topics. As Nicole is into functional programming, it was no surprise that Haskell, Monads and all kind of functional topics came up. We started discussing and reviewing one of her older presentation on Monads, which gave us plenty food for thought. In the afternoon we decided to do some coding and mob programmed an asynchronous error handling Monad in NodeJS. It was a great day and I learned a lot. Thank you Nicole for finding time for us and squeezing in a day of learning between your customer meetings, travel time and conference presentations.

Conclusion
The bottom line of this week is that our community is very inclusive. It is easy to find people who will accept you as a guest or be your guest if you just pay a little attention to their schedule. I had found Nicole's name in the list of speakers of Agile Tour Vienna, so I knew she would come. All I had to do was reach out to her early enough and we made it happen. The same was true for my visit to Carlos. I knew he would run a Code Retreat for GDCR15, so all I had to do was propose doing it together. I encourage you to look out for such kind of learning opportunities. Follow the people you meet at conferences, pay some attention to their (promotional) tweets and conference schedules and do not be afraid to reach out and ask them to spend some time together to discuss, learn, practise or just write some code together.