Announcing the Toronto offering of the Global Day of Code Retreat (Dec 8 2012)

[Debo]

You are invited to attend the 2012 Global Day of Coderetreat (Toronto
chapter), sponsored by Guidewire and Polar Mobile!

Where: Polar Mobile, 156 Front Street West, Suite 610 (5 min walk from
Union Station!)
When: Saturday, December 8th, 10am-6pm
Registration: http://guestli.st/130467
Cost: FREE!

== What is CodeRetreat? ==

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the
fundamentals of software development and design.

Developers engage in focused practice in pairs, working on a single
problem for the whole day in 45 minute sprints. At the end of each
sprint, the entire group pauses for a collective retrospective and
discusses the lessons learned, before re-pairing with a new partner
and starting from scratch.

This format accomplishes a couple of things:
- Pairing up with a new partner for each sprint exposes you to how
other developers work.
- Starting from scratch in every round removes the pressure of
finishing the exercise, and instead enables you to focus on moving
outside of your comfort zone with your design and implementation
skills.

Coderetreat is totally language- and technology-agnostic. If you feel
like using your "native" language all day long, that's up to you. If
you'd like to try a different language or technique each round, that's
awesome too!

== What is the Global Day of Coderetreat? ==

Global Day of Coderetreat is a world-wide event celebrating passion
and software craftsmanship. Last year, over 1800 passionate software
developers in 94 cities around the world spent the day practicing the
craft of software development using the coderetreat format.

See http://globalday.coderetreat.org.

The average CodeRetreat size last year was 15-20 attendees. We can do
better than that, Toronto! We've got room for 100 people at Polar
Mobile's spacious office, and we intend to fill it!

== What's for Lunch? ==

We'll be serving a complimentary catered lunch, courtesy of our event
sponsor Guidewire! Guidewire's engineering culture upholds many of the
same tenets as CodeRetreat, and we're very happy to have them as a
sponsor!

== About Guidewire ==
Guidewire is a rapidly growing software product development company
with a unique track record of 100% customer satisfaction. Voted #1
in the 25 Best Tech Companies to Work For the past two years, they
offer an environment truly dedicated to mentorship, innovation,
excellence, improvement and fulfillment.

Their commitment to Agile practices and product quality goes far
beyond scrum, test-driven development, pair-programming, test
automation, and continuous integration/delivery; it's in their
company's DNA. Their teams are autonomous, self-managing and
empowered, having clear sense of purpose and understanding of the
value of their contributions. They foster a culture based on
collegiality, rationality and integrity - our core values - and
encourage process improvements and innovation to be driven bottom up.

Guidewire is headquartered in Foster City, California, with offices in
Toronto, Beijing, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Munich, Paris, Sydney,
and Tokyo. They are currently hiring software engineers with strong
object oriented and Java experience for their Toronto location.
Please check them out at www.guidewire.com!