Alan Dean

CTO, Developer, Agile Practitioner

Photograph of Alan Dean

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Community Code Spike

After the Open Space Coding Day last Saturday there were a number of discussions about how the event format might be improved. One of those discussions got me thinking about how you might combine the extreme programming practice of Code Spiking along with the collaborative style of Open Spaces.

So I decided that I would try out another experimental format, which I am going to call “Community Code Spike”. The recipe is as follows:

  • Get 6 to 8 developers together.
  • Pre-define a topic (fairly specific rather than generic).
  • One day to spike code

I was inspired by a conversation with Jamie Thomson to propose “working out what is the best way to abstract the DAL in a web application to make the business logic agnostic to being self-hosted or Azure hosted.” as the first spike topic – to be held at the MoveMe.com offices on 14th March at Buckingham Gate, London.

All notes and code will be checked-in to Google Code under the MIT license in order that the community has access to the output of the spike.

At the moment, I have 6 developers lined up:

  1. Alan Dean
  2. James Enock
  3. Jamie Thomson
  4. Simon Evans
  5. David de Florinier
  6. Yucel Evrimer

I suspect that 6 will be a good number for the event – I also think that it is the appropriate number for our offices (any more and we would need to find a bigger place to host it).

Like the Open Space Coding Day, this will not be a one-off event. On the other hand, it is a format that suits ad-hoc arrangements so I won’t be hosting it on a schedule. Instead, I will put together groups of people according to the topic ‘at hand’ based on what I know of their interest and work out what is the right date for that group.

If you like the idea – why not try it out yourself?

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