This summer, I was at Google in NYC for an awesome internship. However, in this post I want to talk about a Code Retreat that somebody at Google organized. The idea is simple: Pair up a bunch of programmers and give them a simple programming task that they can solve as a pair in any language but with a time constraint. Repeat this for a whole day for maximum fun. Each iteration may add additional constraints on how the team should work together or what programming constructs they are allowed to use. It’s a great opportunity to learn from each other and from the experience of solving the same problem over and over again and bringing your program to perfection.

We used Conway’s Game of Life throughout the day and I’ve grown to like it a lot. I just wanted to share my simple implementation in Python and my first program in Go.

Update: I have since implement the Game of Live in Rust and C# and might add more in the future. The code is on GitHub.