Pair programming is at its core. Sitting in a room with many people so you can switch pairs makes it even more fun. You’ll deal with the same Kata for the whole day. The event will consist of 5 sessions, 45 minutes each, and a quick retrospective after every session. This will allow everyone to share and learn from each other. Yes, one full day of programming just for fun. Throw away the code - keep the learnings!
The word “Kata” stands for the problem you’re going to solve over and over again, dealing with different constraints in each session. Basically, this will be your coding challenge of the day. All locations share the same Kata, and the Kata we chose is Conway's “Game of Life” You’ll get more and more familiar with the Kata as time goes by: by the end of the day you’ll clean-code as a PRO!
Every location will share the same schedule, and for locations in the same timezone we’ll organise a couple of “global retrospectives” during the day using hangouts, just to add some more fun to this event. This will allow us to dive really deep into specific problems, and it’ll make it easy for everyone to be on the same page, simultaneously. The ultimate schedule will be published a couple of days before each event. You can still get the most of it from the timetable of the past editions: the schedule isn’t going to be too different. See past schedule.