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Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

The Event I Wish Existed

I spent a long weeked at Py­Cam­p. It was awe­some. How could spend­ing 4 days with 50 geeks hack­ing things and pro­gram­ming python not be awe­some. But I was alone, be­cause re­al­ly, my wife (a lawyer) and son (too young to code yet) would have been bored to tears.

And I know some­thing sim­i­lar hap­pened to a bunch of oth­ers there. Let's face it, we geeks are get­ting old­er. While there is still an in­flux of young peo­ple, we old ones are re­fus­ing to go away, and we are now mar­ried, and have kid­s, and leav­ing for days is un­fair to our fam­i­lies.

So, I wish there was an event where I could go and do this, while my wife could go as well, and my son too, and there would be some­thing for ev­ery­one. Maybe we would not hack all day long, but just half a day. Maybe we wuold hack more games and then be­ta test them on the kid­s.

One good thing about kids is that once you cross a cer­tain thresh­old, in a con­trolled en­vi­ron­men­t, the need for adult mon­i­tor­ing de­creas­es. In m ex­pe­ri­ence, 1 kid needs 1 adult, 2 kids need 1.5, and 5 kids need .5 adult­s.

The board games at night would be in­clu­sive (my wife likes role games, for ex­am­ple), the jug­gling class­es could in­clude kid­s, peo­ple could work on art­work... I don't know, do things that are not ex­clu­sive­ly hack­ing. I love hack­ing but it's a small­er part of my life than it was in the past.

So, any­one has any good ideas? Know of such a place or even­t?


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