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At Ingage Partners, we believe that great software is built by great teams, and great teams never stop learning.
That belief drives everything we do, from how we work with clients to how we grow our own people. One of the ways we live that out is through C3: Code, Craft, Community, our monthly meetup we host to bring together developers from all levels and backgrounds to sharpen their skills, pair program, and explore the deeper questions behind great software development.
We don’t just talk about learning. We practice it, publicly and together.
October’s Meetup: The Great Pumpkin Hoax
We’ve all probably seen it - in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Sally spends Halloween in the pumpkin patch with Linus, waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, while her friends are out trick-or-treating and having a great time at the Halloween party. She does this every Halloween, but this year, after sitting with Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin who never arrives, she decides she has had enough, and leaves Linus to go to the party. She is not going to be fooled by this Great Pumpkin Hoax anymore! But to her surprise, there is a corn maze she has to navigate through, along the way to the party. So our job this month was to help Sally find the shortest path through the maze, so she could join her friends at the party quickly!
In the GitHub repository for this month, we had starter templates in all the popular languages that our pairs like to work in. The templates were set up to read in two corn maze maps - one small map and one large - and there were unit tests to verify that the solution was correct for each map. As we broke into pairs to begin solving the maze, we saw all of the pairs following a similar path (pun intended 😀). Everyone landed on a similar approach, which was really an implementation of a Breadth-First Search (BFS) to find the shortest path from the start to the end.
While not every team solved the problem before we wrapped up, everyone had a solid plan for implementing their algorithm, and was well on their way to helping Sally get to the Halloween party. After discussing the challenges and successes at the end of the meetup, we demonstrated a solution that showed a visualization of the BFS executing on the map. This gave everyone a better idea how the algorithm worked, watching it traverse the map and finding the shortest path. This solution was mostly generated with the help of GitHub Copilot during the meeting, and was generated using the Go language, which is not one that we normally support - but now we have that template as a starter for future meetups for any developers who want to try out Go!
Why It Matters
This is more than a meetup. It’s a reflection of who we are.
Ingage invests in growth, not just within our company, but in the broader Cincinnati tech community. We know that building better developers builds better teams, and better teams create better outcomes for our clients.
Come Code With Us
If you’re a developer in the Cincinnati area, we’d love to see you at our next C3 meetup. We meet monthly, on the third Wednesday of the month, at the Ingage Partners office (2943 Riverside Drive), and we welcome developers of all backgrounds, experience levels, and technologies & programming languages. Come to write code, pair up, ask questions, and eat some pizza. We look forward to connecting with you!
