Belfast Coderetreat - Saturday

I mentioned this at the Software Testing Clinic Belfast last night. The link is https://coderetreat-belfast.eventbrite.co.uk

Saturday will be our attempt to bring the Global Day of Code Retreat to Belfast.

We are really pleased to have a great venue in central Belfast, thanks to Flexera our sponsor.

This event is free to attend and only requires you have a little experience and pay a £5 deposit which you will get back on the day. Full details are on the EventBrite page (link above).

I know two or three people from our Software Testing Clinic have signed up already! Any questions, please give me a shout.

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Looking forward to this. See you all Saturday. :sunglasses:

Just wanted to post a quick update with some feedback:

There were 6 45-min pair-programming sessions to construct a program using a differrnt constraint each time. Examples of constraints: must take a test first approach (TDD), must have no more than 4 lines of code per method, must take an object-oriented approach, or must start your effort using another group’s code. I got to work with folks in these languages: C#, Go, Python and Rust (yes, Rust :smile: … never even heard of it before!). It was a very interesting and informative day with these highlights:

  • Thanks to @keith.maxwell for facilitating and Flexera for sponsoring
  • I learned how much more performant I can make my code after several iterations of the exercises, and I got to see and learn from the approaches others take
  • I was surprised by how quickly I could ‘get’ the other languages
  • What I will do differently after the meetup: work with other languages more: Python and Java definitely

Other takeaways:

  • How to do TDD in a real-world sense
  • The importance of testability and how TDD really helps with this
  • The value of tester and developer pair programming/designing
  • How in a real-world sense to write code for humans, not computers, and how important this is

Highly recommended for testers with an automation/coding interest if you have the opportunity to go to one in future!