Report from First Extreme Eiffel Coding Fest

We spend about 15 minutes on quick review of the design and assigment of tasks. Since we had four computers we came up with four tasks. Below you can see pictures taken by Sam O'Connor during the day of the fest.

Here is a picture of me and Richard Mitchell trying to sort out the handling of the POST method. Actually I was trying to appear like I knew what was going on in the code I wrote a year ago. If you look closely at the picture, you'll notice a network connection. Sam brought not only his laptop, but a hub and a bunch of cables (not to mention his digital camera that took these pictures)

The team of Paul Ford, Andreas Sholtz with assistance from Raphael Simon fearlessly dove into GOBO and using gelex created a class to convert Wiki files into html pages. In the process they flushed out a bug in the Gobo libraries!

Cliff Richie and Tom Morissette, with some kibitzing from an unknown guest, quickly disposed of their assigment - a class to parse HTTP headers. Cleverly they inherited from DS_HASH_TABLE. Note, that in order to get close to the power outlets we had to rearrange the tables in the room. There were no table up front, where the outlets were. XP teams are like that. You should rearrange your office to help the team...

Extreme programming makes you hungry. Fortunately, Kent Beck stopped by and brought us some food. The team has to eat! Note that in the picture on the right Paul is "driving" now.

A heavy contingent from ISE was present. In this picture you see Parker, Raphael, Andreas and Sam, working on code to remove special characters from POST data. Andreas was not happy with a call to a C-routine in this code, so Sam rewrote the routine in Eiffel during the morning keynote. The keynote was about components and XML... little boring.

Sam is very tall and with his small camera he can easily take pictures like this. On the left, notice the cover of "Extreme Programming Explained" book and on the right note ISE ebench on the screen. You can figure out for yourself whose heads these are.

Paul and Andreas switched to Paul's laptop at the start of the project, as Paul's machine was faster. Tom and Cliff used Cliff's machine. Both of these computers were running Windows. So this was not only Extereme Programming, but also cross-platform!

INTEGRATION! We were displaying the output on the screen. As you can judge from our expressions, we had some minor glitches.

I wasn't particularly clear about the spec for converting Wiki pages to HTML, so we had some last minute changes to try. Paul's and Andreas' code came through with flying colors!

Success! Note the screen behind. Netscape is displaying a page served by the Eiffel/Wiki server. On the right the Extreme Eiffel Team. Go Team!!!

The event turned out great. The time went by quickly and everyone had fun. Thanks guys!

...richie (August, 2000)