The Sunday after the SCNA conference a code retreat was held at 3 locations in Chicago. I attended the one at the 8th Light office, hosted by Corey Haines.

Coderetreats are really awesome! With global day being in a week from now I like to tell a little about coderetreats and why you want to join us on global day.

So what is a coderetreat?

Besides being just really awesome, a coderetreat is a day of intensive practice, focusing on fundamentals of programming and software design.

The essence is in practice. A coderetreat offers you a safe environment to practice a day long together with other programmers, without having to worry about getting things done.

By doing the same kata multiple times with different constraints, you’ll learn when these constraints can be useful and when to avoid them. Examples of constraints are to not use if-statements, use at most 2 lines of code in a function, or not to use return values.

Why we need practice

In most professions regular practice is mandatory. For example, would you want to see a band that only plays together when they perform live on stage? You would probably only go see them once, and find them rather disappointing.

Programmers also need constant practice to improve their skills. Programming is hard. Becoming good at it takes a lot of practice. And as part of becoming better, we’ll learn about even more things we want to practice. Like a band we also need a safe environment to practice. We cannot experiment in our live performance -our every day job- as it would hurt our customers.

A coderetreat session provides you this environment. Besides practice being important, practicing in a coderetreat is really fun too; program all day with other people, without the urge to deliver!

Update obviously there’s no way you’ll make it to Global Day of Coderetreat 2012, so I deleted the registration information. If you like programming, follow the annual Global Day of Coderetreat event and attend a location near to you.