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CodeRetreat #1 set a pretty high standard for fun, learning, engagement, connection, and community building. CodeRetreat#2 at LeanDog blew that standard away.

More people showed up. More passion and creativity and humor showed up. Corey Haines and J.B. Rainsberger showed up again (and J.B. brought his wife Sarah), and Cheezy showed up. Chris Judd and James Shingler (the Groovy/Grails guys) showed up. Jon Stahl and his wife Deb prepared awesome food all day. The sun and the seagulls were out; the boat was a lovely, expansive work/play space. Lots of room to extemporize, come together, break apart again, project our mob programming experiments.

We had our schtick down better. We did Java Conway’s Game of Life kata/turtles all the way down. We ping-pong-paired more and more throughout the day. The retrospectives were long, and rich with feedback, humor, and (in the afternoon) micro-brews.

J.B. and Corey performed a Game of Life test-drive that was thought-provoking, hilarious, and quite crowd-interactive. Jim and Chris followed with a rather crowd-hushing port of J.B and Corey’s work to Groovy. Sighs and gulps all around. Nothing like seeing the same test cases in Groovy and Java to re-sensitize you to Java’s nasty noisy gunk. I’d love for us to repeat that at CodeRetreat #3.

CodeRetreat #3 will likely be in Columbus, OH sometime in May, co-sponsored by Pillar and LeanDog. We’ll take care not to collide with the several other Columbus and Cleveland tech events in May.  #4 will likely be in Philly or Montreal, perhaps as early as June; maybe July. Watch the ning site for details.

Thanks so much Jon and Deb and Cheezy for hosting us. Yesterday will be really hard to top, and we’ll have fun trying.