On June 30th, Monday we met in C-Base in Mitte, because we thought it would be one of the very few places in Berlin where we could would not end up watching the match Germany vs. Algeria. This didn't quite work out, because they showed intereting german Sci-Fi movies from the 70s, but the atmosphere was nice.
At first we discussed a bit about our work and the software development woes we have with old libraries, old supported platform (Windows 2000 anyone?), extremely long builds, and trying to do migrations and quality improvements "under the radar". As one craftsman put it: "The SWK is my self-help group, without it I wouldn't last at work".
After that we still wanted to code a bit, and because Jan raved so much about how could never go back to Eclipse, now that he mastered IntelliJ we decided to try FizzBuzz in IntelliJ. In the end we learned a lot of shortcuts and hotkeys, but our most fervent Eclipse-fan was not convinced, lacking a "killer-feature".
Since we were only 4 persons, we did the TDD cycle by handing control to the next person after each step:
It was fun and we had a lot of discussion at what point which of next step makes sense and which does not.
In the end we still wanted a real programming challenge and tried to solve it without using ifs. In languages with maps and map.get(index, default) methods it is easy, but in Java we had to some tricks. After a lot of refactoring the solution even wasn't so bad.