Ready, set, type! CodeJam at Goodgame Studios
Have you ever participated in a Code Jam? Last week, we enjoyed one of these programming marathons when several teams from our web development department hosted their first Code Jam at Goodgame Studios. Their mission: to develop functional software products in under 48 hours – and have lots of fun doing it!
The event kicked off at 8 AM on the first day. Everyone with a passion for developing software could take part, from junior project managers to senior developers. They quickly formed four teams. Since the CodeJam wasn’t connected to the daily work at Goodgame Studios in any way, the programming pros were completely free to choose which project they wanted to work on.
They worked meticulously on a 2D game with the theme “trade”, a movie information app, a 3D browser game, and a web application for hosting and automatically scaling applications in the cloud. This last program may sound complicated to someone who’s not very tech savvy, but it actually served to support the other teams because they could use it to make their programs available within the network.
Their working methods were just as varied as the projects – the recipes for success ranged from “just start programming” to structured procedures following iterative and agile methods, as is common in modern software development. The Code Jam thus provided the perfect platform for the teams to freely test new methods that could also be useful for their day-to-day work. Frameworks and platforms like PHP, JavaScript, and Ruby on Rails were used for the technical implementation.
With pizza and drinks on hand, the participants hammered away at their keyboards late into the night, and the next day they carried on working with full concentration. At the end of the second day and 10,000 lines of code later, the results were presented. And they were impressive indeed! In the end, everyone left with not only a certificate, but also a wealth of new experience and knowledge from this exciting and enjoyable Code Jam.
