Global Code Retreat Day 2012

Couldn't just miss it - and the event was awesome. It surprises me every time that the practice which doesn't really sound impressive ends up to be a lot of fun and insight. And a spark and an inspiration and interesting people.
I was looking for helpful tips to run my own corporate session and wasn't disappointed. My biggest take-out is a concept of the "ping-pong round" when pair of developers are writing one test each and just enough code to make the test pass. It quickly becomes a "competitive ping-pong" as soon as your test misses some corner or null case and revenge follows with another failing tests. This simple, simple technique forces adoption of TDD in an unobtrusive way and eventually results in a better code. The difficult part is to write the very first test - and helpful advice was "just create a REALLY simple one - like collection has length greater than zero". And from there it went.
The activities used the usual "Conway Game of Life" although I would really like to find similarly interesting and intuitive problem - just to keep my corporate audience interested for the next time...