February 2012 – Coding Golf

Details 

Golf Balls by walknboston

Date: Tuesday 28th February 2012

Time: 7:15pm start to 9:15pm .

Location: http://themorrismanpub.co.uk
Google Maps: http://g.co/maps/ptzt5

Theme: Practical Session

New Venue

Please note the new venue. It’s our first meeting at The Morrisman. Follow the links above for further information.

When I called in, the menu and food being served looked excellent. The beer was pretty good too.

Coding Golf

Shaun Finglas has kindly offered to run this months session. His proposal email was as follows:

My proposal is simply Code Golf. We’ll spend an hour (ish) solving a fairly trivial problem in the style of a kata as normal. The twist is you must then refactor your code to an extreme level so that you can solve the problem in the least amount of characters possible.

Rules:
– The code must compile/execute
– You can use any language you want as long as you can accept user input/display output – think simple console application
– The code must implement the required functionality

The challenge will be revealed on the night so there is no prerequisites apart from laptops. The more laptops we have the better. People can work solo/pair if they want but as long as we have enough machines we should be fine.

“Golfing” real life production code is not something you would want to do, but I’ve found Code Golf challenges very fun, and they show just what sort of merciless refactoring you can do once you have a good suite of tests to back you up. These sort of challenges are incredibly hard without a good suite of tests, so you can often win over people who maybe do not see the value in unit testing production code.

Lightning Talks

As yet (usual!) their are no volunteers for a lightning talk. If you have any topic you’d like to share with the group then you can have a 10 minute slot at the beginning of the meeting. Please email the group or mention it at the venue before we start.

Hope to see you there,
Neil Kidd