It’s that time of year again for Programmers the world over to gather together and practice their art. Yes, It’s the 2015 Global Day of Code Retreat on Saturday 14th November, and once again I have found myself involved. 4 years ago I attended my first GDCR in Wellington and it was great fun. Now, having stepped in to help facilitate last year, I have stepped up to Host it, with the help of a few of my colleagues as Xero.

If memory serves, this is at least the 4th time Xero have graciously sponsored and provided the venue to hold the event in Wellington. And for the First time we have our Auckland office involved too, which is the first step to a worldwide rollout I suspect.

The event is a great place for developers to come along and meet other devs from their local community and mingle with the other languages groups around town. We always get a nice mix of languages turn up including c#, ruby, objective-c, java, javascript developers, along with those enthusiasts who choose to use more niche or up and coming languages like Rust or Go.

We will spend the day working with Conway’s Game of Life with a few 45 minute long exercises. In these exercises we will practice TDD in a Pair Programming setting, with a special rule or constraint applied. I don’t want to give anything away, so you will have to wait until after the event to find out what these constraints are.

I’m looking forward to Saturday and will follow up with a post-mortem of the event as well. For more information, check out the GDCR homepage at http://globalday.coderetreat.org/.