SF Coderetreat 2011 Success!

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Of the 50 participants that rsvp’ed to the event, about 25 showed up:

http://www.meetup.com/sfcoderetreat

We started at 9:30 am and our general plan for the day was the following:

1: get our feet wet and try to understand the problems

2: maybe try something other than 2D array?

3: focus on names during this session
4: think about working on exercises either super TDD or super OO.
5: go nuts and try something totally different
6: power went out around 5 pm so everyone went home
Mostly everyone worked on Ruby on Rails or Javascript. One guy tried using Dart and another tried Matlab during one of the sessions.

I missed my Skype call with Samir for 9:30 because we initially had problems accessing the wifi at Engine Yard (sorry Samir!) We were able to make our 10 am Skype Call with Cincinnati and seems like everything over there was going great. We also had a Skype call with Corey later on in the day while he was in Honolulu and that was exciting.

After each 45 minute session, we had a 15 minute introspective talk. We were able to take videos of most of these wrap ups and lots of photos, which we are going to post soon.

Beverages and beer were provided by Engine Yard and there was much rejoicing. We had plenty of breakfast items and snacks but went out to grab lunch. Next Coderetreat, I plan on purchasing less breakfast items and instead purchase simple sandwiches for everyone in case people would rather stay at the office during the break.

One of our participants brought us shirts, stickers and wrestling head gears from the Mexico Coderetreat.

People started trickling out/getting tired around 4 pm. Power went out around 5 and people were pretty tired so we wrapped it up.

Some of the feedback we received included having more than one problem set (other than Conway’s Game of Life) as the participants were mostly able to figure out the code by the 4th session. Second feedback was having pre-assigned partners for the 1st session and then letting everyone choose whoever they wanted to pair with after that.

Overall, everyone really enjoyed the event and said they would come back to it again. I met up with one participant to return him his charger and he told me that he was looking forward to the next one!

Thank you Corey for making all of this happen and for the help and thank you Jim for guiding me in the right direction.

Cristina
SF Coderetreat Hostess

11-16-11 Intense dream

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First dream, I was at an arcade and the janitor was turning off the machines. I calculated that the most tickets one could win from a game was 26, which meant I to obtain all of these tickets in one sitting, I had to play a basketball game. I found a kiddy basketball game and I kept leaning over to place the ball in the hoop. At the end of the game, the machine started spitting out tickets and stated that it couldn’t spit out anymore tickets. I was happy because I got the 26 tickets that I wanted.

Second dream, I was at school getting ready to take a test. I was looking at the back of a notebook when I realized that someone had printed information in it. A dangerous person was impersonating my brother and I needed to do something with this information.

The dream switches over to my grandmother’s place. My family and I are in the apartment. The front wooden door has a gated door and both doors are wide open. A menacing guy down the hall is walking towards us. I tell my dad that we need to lock the doors immediately but we have no way to lock the gated door. Panic starts creeping in as we attempt to lock the wooden door. In the mean time, another guy had broken in downstairs and is making his way up the stairs. In my panic state, I am trying to take photos with my phone of the incriminating evidence saved on an old school phone. I was considering sending myself a copy of the text to my email but realized it might get deleted by the bad guys.

Dream sequence skips over to my family and I rushing to get into a green punch buggy. In my dream, I’ve realized that punch buggys do not have nearly enough room for five people.

Skip scenes again and we’re now in a supermarket. I take out all the money I have in my pocket and purchase $10 worth of pink train tickets from an atm. I usher my family out of the supermarket. I have an empty bookbag and a cooler with me. I rapidly start piling food and drink items into them. I am able to pack a liter of water, one container of juice (the top to the other container of juice was broken) and some other items including a plastic bag with three slightly decaying apples and a bruised mango. I search the fridge but I don’t find anything edible that will keep very long that doesn’t need cooking. I find a pantry full of asian foods. It hits me that packaged ramen and sealed noodles are the best preserved foods and I grab as many as I can. I also take a couple of panda cookies filled with chocolate to liven up everyone’s spirit. I notice a row of mini milk cartons but I don’t have anymore room in my bag. My dad comes over to tell me that we need to go. I run off with my weightless backpack and cooler and rush towards the train station next door.

Whenever I have these kind of dreams, I always wake up with tired legs.

Take 2: My ‘Mostly Vegetarian/Pescetarian’ Diet

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As posted in Wikipedia: “The word meat comes from the Old English word mete, which referred to food in general.”

How much meat do you eat daily? Weekly? Monthly?

We mass produce meat in animal factories and we consume more meat than necessary. Supermarkets supply meat in bulk. Every restaurant has a plethora of meat options. Asian restaurants, such as Vietnamese cuisine, serve primarily meat dishes.

Like millions of other people, I am a gluttonous carnivore. As @mattknox likes to say, “I only eat animals that eat other animals.”

My goal was to survive a whole month eating significantly less meat.

As one who eats meat at every meal, it’s a bit challenging being on a ‘mostly vegetarian/pescetarian’ diet. It’s like telling a junkie that their dealer is going on vacation or telling a kid not to eat said marshmallow.

My experimental diet consisted of consuming less meat: more vegetables and more seafood. A similar diet is the paleolithic diet. I did not want my diet to be as strict (no grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils) so I modified it to my liking.

First step: finding restaurants that serve vegetarian/pescetarian dishes. Second step: finding a restaurant that actually serves good tasting food. And third step: finding these restaurants in your area.

One of the things that I noticed is that most vegetarian/pescetarian dishes are fried:

Fried tofu, fried calamari, fried spring rolls.

The best way to avoid these unhealthy dishes is to cook your own food rather than dine out.

Within a week, my body felt less bogged down and cleaner. I felt more refreshed and sticking to vegetables was getting easier everyday.

I was only able to keep up with the ‘mostly pescetarian’ diet for two weeks. I tend to forget that I’m anemic. Anemia is a condition where the body is not able to produce enough red blood cells to carry iron and oxygen to your system. With the decrease of meat in my diet, I experienced fatigue, dizziness and often times, would feel confused.

I am now back on my carnivore regimen and am looking to modify it again in the near future to a more balanced diet.