§ November 12, 2009 16:57 by
beefarino |
We had big fun tonight at the first Charlotte ALT.NET user group hack night. Special thanks to Mike Linnen and Xpient for hosting the event.
The theme of the evening was taken from the recent Raleigh and Carolina Code Camps: Rock Paper Scissors. Teams coded modules to play rounds of RPS, uploaded their assembles to a server, and duked it out over three rounds of riveting RPS action.
I was a bit apprehensive about the event, mostly afraid of looking like an idiot in front of some really smart people. But once the hacking started we all fell into a groove and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I chose to try and predict my opponent's actions using a bit of fuzzy logic and some statistics. It worked fairly well through the first two rounds of the tournament, but I was given a resounding spanking in the final round by @micahlmartin and @DeveloperInfra. In the end, a three-way tie for first place was resolved with a fourth round, where @micahlmartin edged us out with a perfect score!
I may blog about my approach to the puzzle some other time, but I wanted to jot down some things I noticed this evening.
When I'm under a time contraint, I can get a lot of work done quickly. I don't know why this surprises me, but after tonight I'm considering adding stricter timeboxes to my daily GTD routine.
Hacking is fun. Lately coding has started to feel monotonous. A lot of the projects I've got going on are hitting non-techcnial walls, and moving forward is proving to be difficult. It was a blast to hammer out some code without those pesky business boundaries to bring it all down. I think scheduling some regular geek time to work on things like Project Euler or some code katas would be a good idea - no expectations past my own enjoyment.
Overall a very positive experience, thanks everyone!