At the end of November, I attended two meet ups, Securing Internet of things, organized by ShareIt Ljubljana, and Coderetreat, organized by Zeljko and lead by Peter.
As I am very interested in Internet security, and Internet of things (watch, light bulb, you name it), has become a hip word, I decided to take a journey to Ljubljana. It is 130km from Zagreb, but the thing is that Ljubljana is in Slovenia so I did get a change to brush my Slovenian (slo1 and slo2 tv channels in the eighties always had better cartoons than TV Zagreb).
Yes I know, I am terrible at taking photos!
I was very pleased that I understood all security topics in Slovenian. I learned that internet providers, in context of security, are actually companies that take care of highway road maintenance. There were 40 people, and pace was very high. After one hour of presentation there was one hour of discussion, with no break. Something that is not possible in Croatia, because of cultural differences. In the end I broke the ice, and starting conversation with security experts, they in Slovenian, me in Croatian. Actually we had a lot in common. Slovenia is preparing for electronic prescription, project that I was implementing in Croatia while working for Ericsson.
Fun room!
If you are around Ljubljana, I strongly suggest that you connect with ShareIt on Meetup platform.
As excellent things always happen by accident, at the end of our road trip, Shime showed Zeljko and me Scout Irish Pub in Samobor. It has a selection of almost 300 beers and it is a paradise for me.
Coderetreat teaches you TDD practices in 45 minutes sessions on the problem of Conway's Game of life. Every session has some constraint (e.g. make a commit every 4 minutes or delete your changes), and as sessions progress, constrains are harder.
What we learned in previous session?
I did two sessions, and I learned one interesting technique. I paired with Janko, and I wrote tests, he implemented code. As I wrote my test very simple, he wrote code implementation as simple as possible, just enough to pass my test. This was my aha moment. Write you tests in such manner that are hard to fool.
Next session instructions
I suggest that you try Coderetreat without worrying about your programming skill level. You can only learn something. Or even better, take the initiative like Zeljko did, and help to organize Coderetreat at your location!
