On Saturday morning, Alex, Hunter and I packed up to move back to Oaxaca. On the way to the bus station, Hunter made a last minute audible and hung out with his video game friends instead. Alexa and I took the bus and shared music on the way.

Alex’s aunt and uncle live in the city, so we went straight to their house from the bus station. We had Chinese buffet for lunch with his aunt and brother – it was an interesting mix of Mexican spices and Chinese food (similar to Chifas in Péru).

After lunch, we went to the Coding Dojo which was run by Oaxaca.rb  (headed by Hermes, Fernando, and others from Logical Bricks Solutions).

I tried to get their Tennis refactoring example to work on my machine, but there was an issue with my version of Ruby. We didn’t have internet, so I couldn’t download the right gems. Alex couldn’t get his Windows box working either.

Since we couldn’t get it working on everyone’s machine, we switched to a different model (other than pair programming). One person would be in the hot seat on the projector live refactoring and the “navigator” would move into the chair next.

At first I was feeling shy – it was in Spanish, programming with Ruby (which I don’t use every day), using unfamiliar tools, such as a plain old text editor instead of an IDE, and I’m naturally a bit shy of being in the spotlight (I know, I hide it well sometimes :P).

The beginning was a bit rocky. Some were unable to figure out where they went wrong and had a hard time falling back to a working state. They were ignoring my suggestion to use version control, so I inserted myself into the rotation and participated after that. I set up the git repository and this made refactoring go much smoother for later sessions. I hope my disciplined approach wore off (red, green, refactor, review, commit). I was surprised that people were attempting to commit without ever looking at their diffs! :-O

I had a great time and would definitely suggest attending sessions like this! We have a coding retreat in Philadelphia that was pretty great last year.

That evening I checked into a hostel (which I hated and later changed) and then met Alex and his cousin for a night on the town. We checked out a bar with a live band that played What’s Up and traditional Mexican rock and later went dancing. It was a lot of fun learning some latin moves!