75 constraints used in 2015 across the Globe for Global Day of Code Retreat

Tomorrow on 18th November 2017 is Global Day of Code Retreat 2017 #GDCR17 This will be my 3rd year in a row to attend and practice my craft. After 13 years of experience writing code it still feels like a ride in a theme park to attend Global Day of Code Retreat. In year 2015 I copied all the constraints from the website www.coderetreat.org

Here are the 75 unique constraints that was used on that day

1. Introduction to the problem
2. Pair Programming
3. Test Driven Development
4. Small methods (<=5)
5. No side-effect methods.
6. No if-else
7. No conditional statements
8. No loop
9. Ping Pong
10. No constraints
11. Babysteps
12. Mute ping-pong
13. Brutal refactoring game
14. Zombies!
15. Tell don’t ask
16. Hexagonal board
17. Simplicity
18. No boolean flag
19. No array
20. Explore, Stabilize, Implement
21. Pure Functions Only
22. One Level of Indentation Per Method.
23. No TDD, Honeymoon round
24. TDD, keyboard only
25. On paper
26. TDD focus on behaviour
27. TDD Like you mean it
28. Code swapping
29. No language primitives across method boundries.
30. Make a test list No code in first 0 minutes, make a list of tests, then decide in which order to implement them
31. No touchpad, no mouse.
32. Intention, naming convention.
33. Extreme OO
34. First 0 minutes paper only, no arrays and no lists
35. Acceptance tests only
36. Use no matrix
37. No Return statements!
38. Pair programing, 0 min test paper only
39. Fixed roles one writes tests, the other implements and swap 0 minutes before end all of the sudden 😉
40. Maxlines per method
41. No predefined datastructures
42. Four Rules of Simple Design
43. Closing Circle
44. Commit every 5 minutes, delete the rest Reduce the time to 3 minutes Last round 1 minute
45. Taking baby steps write exactly one test within 2 minutes and commit it if you are in time, if not revert the changes
46. Clean code
47. Everything is represented by an immutable object, objects cannot change state.
48. Primitive Revulsion.
49. Three Laws Compliant.
50. Total Ego Annihilation.
51. So Fresh, So Clean.
52. Cells talking to cells De-emphasis on the GoL world / board.
53. Pairs can only communicate via tests
54. Round Robin dojo
55. Legacy code! This is a longer  where devs unknowingly write untested legacy code with no restraints and halfway through they need to switch partners and maintain and refactor that code
56. Driver gets keyboard
57. Shortcuts are not allowed (e.g. ALT-TAB)
58. Muted pair!
59. Switch to 3 dimensions
60. Object Calisthenics
61. TDD + Simplicity + Immutable + Hive Board
62. Noun Avoidance / Verb It Up, Verby Mc. Verberson
63. Procedural (no tests) OR immutable objects
64. Mob programming (basic Game of Life, no other constraints)
65. Hive board (cell only has 6 neighbors instead of 8, a grid can be represented as a beehive) + mute mode (nobody can talk)
66. 4 Verbs Only
67. With graph constraints
68. Extreme OO
69. Evil Coder!
70. Tell, don’t ask Only void methods
71. Extract ’til you drop
72. Exploratory testing
73. Healing grid
74. Let’s see how many alive cells you have on a 100X100 matrix after 1000 iterations ?
75. No exceptions

Hope this list helps you tomorrow…

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