Last year I was thinking about a session during which attendees would learn how to focus on refactoring. I had some thoughts about this: we would need a list of coding smells, and have some cards to give the attendees that had that coding smells in their code. Now the obvious question was: how can you have coding smells if you do not have a code base? I thought about it, and then I figured it out: during coderetreats I anyway see legacy code after 10-15 minutes. So if this session would take…

I wrote a post on the history of Taking Baby Steps, you can read it here.

Now I would like to tell you more about the workshop and the technique itself. While coding, for me it is very important to be focused on one idea. Why? Because this is how programmer mistakes appear in the code; some people tell them bugs. The other thing I am interested in is to have an undo button…

Let me tell you a story on how I thought about teaching other programmers how to take small steps to help them minimize the mistakes by focusing on a small thought.

A couple of years ago I was working on a legacy project, meaning I did not know anything about the business, and it was written in Delphi .Net which was totally unknown to me. I needed to translate this medium-sized code-base from Delphi .Net into .Net / Silverlight.

All the team was using a centralized source…

As last year I helped the coderetreat first-time facilitators to jump-in and organize their first coderetreat. I had some training sessions on Google Hangout during which I talked with a lot of passionate professionals from all over the world. Together with me Jim Hurne had done the same effort to spread his knowledge about the way he facilitates a coderetreat.

Jim has done a lot of work for the Global Day, he added the sessions on the…