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a place I put stuff

Code Crawl

Posted on June 21, 2011

A code crawl is an event that’s a mix of a hackathon and a pub crawl. Here’s how it works:

Interested parties grab their laptops or, I suppose, lug their desktops, out to the bars. Everybody orders a drink or two and hacks on code for around an hour. The group gathers around a big table if the bar has it, or keeps in quasi-remote contact from the bar’s far-flung corners via IRC or the like. If the atmosphere allows it, it’s fun for participants to just yell “try it now” or “pull from my repo” across the room. Maybe they’ll get puzzled stares from other patrons. They should just explain that it’s a code crawl and everyone is programming! When they reach a good break point (ha), or just after an hour or two, everybody closes out their tabs (or the single mondo-tab!) and heads off to the next stop on the crawl.

Groups can do something fun when they think they’ve collectively hit the Ballmer Peak. Of course, it’s probably then a good time to wrap up the crawl!