Barney Dellar

Last weekend, I ran Coderetreat ( https://www.coderetreat.org ) with a colleague of mine, Natalia Zon. It was the first time running such an event for either of us, so we were kind of feeling our way a bit. But one thing we did want to do was to make it an inclusive, welcoming event.  We knew we needed a Code of Conduct, so we adopted the Berlin Code  of Conduct ( https://berlincodeofconduct.org ). But we went further, and Natalia emphasised why  it was important to have such a code. She made it clear that anyone who couldn’t adhere to the CoC was free to leave. And we published our HR Managers email address, so that attendees could report us  if they needed to. We wanted to make it clear that we took this seriously.  When we introduced ourselves, we gave our pronouns too, and then we invited everyone else to introduce themselves, and to give their pronouns too. It’s one of those easy things that can mean a lot.  Now, we had decided to follow the Coder...

When we ran our recent Coderetreat, one session I really wanted to try was one I picked up from a workshop I did earlier in the year with Kevlin Henney and Jon Jagger. The basic idea is to show people  how quickly you can create Legacy Code.  We had a 45-minute session. For the first 20 minutes, we asked people to pair up, and solve Conway’s Game Of Life from scratch, with no other constraints.  But 20 minutes in, we asked one person from each pair to stand up and move to a different partner, and carry on.  Then, five minutes later we asked the other  person to move as well to a different partner again, and then carry on solving the problem. The code they encountered was only 25 minutes old, but everyone found it incomprehensible and convoluted.  We discussed it at a retrospective afterwards, and people were quite angry at the code they encountered, and at the people who’d left it (who were in the room with them!). And they felt guilty about walking away fr...