So after spending the entire day walking around doing stuff (and at one point get wrangled into MCing) for DevCon at DevOpsDays, me and a couple PhRUG guys got on a (red-eye?) bus to Baguio City for the non-official Philippine leg of the Global Day of Code Retreat.
This isn’t a full write-up of the event so I’ll keep this short and simple. The event was at Drei‘s place with just a bunch of Ruby, Python, and PHP guys from both Manila and Baguio hacking up random stuff instead of doing the whole Code Retreat thing.
at the after event, aka “Yo dawg, I heard you like taking pictures so here’s a picture of people taking your picture so you can have a picture of you taking pictures of people taking pictures”
Being the slacker that I am, I didn’t have anything planned out beforehand. I thought I’d just go the same route as with Startup Weekend Manila and just be a rubber duck floating around groups. Fortunately, Buddy brought along his significant other Rizza with the intention of having her learn programming from the participants of the event.
I couldn’t resist this teaching challenge. So for the entire event, I went on to give an impromptu crash course on the fundamentals of software development.
I started off with basic imperative/procedural programming via pseudocode (to drill in the idea that software development is not about computers but about solving problems). As we progressed I moved on to Ruby for the more technical side of things (basic data types) up to Object Oriented basics.
first programs – potato salad and quadratic formula
By mid-day, I had this little flash of insanity and began downloading >250MB of development stuff from a certain site.
That flash of insanity was to go back to the original Code Retreat exercise, Conway’s Game of Life, and build it in Java to teach software development: coding conventions, revision control, test automation, refactoring, etc.
Of course, I had to teach the most crucial concept in software development: how to wing it. And that was where Android came in.
So we had a base GoL class and a freshly installed Android SDK. A couple of Google searches later and a lot of guesswork, we were able to make the whole thing work as a Live Wallpaper in around 1.5 hours.
Lack of sleep and preparation can turn a Ruby guy into a Java developer. LOL
[…] little app/wallpaper we made at the code retreat? I’ve published it and it’s now free for download at the Android […]
nice one bry,
“at the after event, aka “Yo dawg, I heard you like taking pictures so here’s a picture of people taking your picture so you can have a picture of you taking pictures of people taking pictures””