Winging It

Large Latte, No Foam, Extra Code Please

A little over a year ago, Code and Coffee was born. After a weekend in Kalamazoo and a good talk with Mike about his little group of Bitslingers in Cincy, Jeffery and I stole borrowed hatched the idea to get our butts out of bed early, hit a coffee shop somewhere, and write some code. Any code would do, but preferably something outside our comfort zone. Code and coffee numero uno saw us working on the Ruby Koans.

It’s moved around Columbus to different places. Started out at Polaris, held in Dublin a couple times, and we’ve had a pretty regular group at Stauf’s in Grandview since last November. I’ve lost track of the number of new faces that have showed up at our little gathering, but there are a few – like Greg and Andrew – who have been to almost all of them.

“Yeah, so what, Wingfield…we know you do this Code and Coffee crap, it’s in your twitter stream more than ice hockey and Hair Band Friday combined.”

OK, ok…my point: Last Thursday, Aug 12th, we had a 23 geeked up, caffeinated coders in 3 locations in two different cities writing code for the fun of it before they went to work. 23 guys and gals in Grandview, Columbus, and Indianapolis. (Props to Scott for getting it rolling in Indy!) 23 people would be one helluva dev team; especially if it’s THESE 23 who care enough to get up and do an hour of coding for fun before work.

What do these 23 people compare to?

• That’s a whole football team plus a kicker
• That’s 10 more people than have ever coached the Chicago Bears
• That’s an entire active NHL roster
• That’s one less than all the sousaphone players in the OSU Marching Band…in other words, it’s all the sousaphone players NOT dotting the I.

That’s a lot of sports references for a bunch of geeks so…

• 23 is the atomic number of vanadium
• 23 is the port used for telnet
• Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times…that might be a bad example
• 23 is the lowest prime number to consist of consecutive digits. (Back to geekdom!!)

I’ve had a lot of fun at Code and Coffee and can’t deny having 23 people at three locations on some random Thursday brings a smile to my face.

But why stop at 23?

Want to geek it up with fellow geeks? Start a Code and Coffee. Pick a place to meet and a time and hit up twitter. (We use the hashtag #codeandcoffee, it’s worked great for setting up gatherings.) Let’s go beyond 23 folks.

At least to 34 so I can make some Walter Payton references.

45 for a little Archie Griffin.

Then to 61 so I can add Rick Nash to the fray.