next »

[Anthony Hart-Jones]

The basic idea of /dev/fort is that you dump a group of developers in a small, isolated fort (or other isolated building) off in the middle of nowhere and see what craziness comes out.  No internet (though there is a network), little or no mobile-phone signal (depending on location) and no distractions.

Having spoken to someone who was on one (though I never went myself), it sounds like the format could suit a five-day game-jam.  They even developed an intranet Twitter-equivalent for broadcasting to all the other developers on-site.

http://devfort.com/

[Klaim]

Interesting concept!

[Jonathan Whiting]

It sounds like a pretty sweet idea, but a bit of a logistical nightmare to get setup.

[bluescrn]

It sounds like a pretty sweet idea, but a bit of a logistical nightmare to get setup.

Sounds pretty cool, I quite like idea of some sort of 'game jam holiday' - as a single geek, I don't really do conventional holidays...

Not sure about doing it somewhere isolated, though... whilst it might be more productive that way to begin with, keeping the supply of caffiene and takeaway flowing my be a pain. And it'd probably be more fun if the evenings involved eating out and a decent amount of beer? (something that I'm hoping the UK TIGJammers will be up for on at least one of the evenings!)

[Jonathan Whiting]

It sounds like a pretty sweet idea, but a bit of a logistical nightmare to get setup.

Not sure about doing it somewhere isolated, though... whilst it might be more productive that way to begin with, keeping the supply of caffiene and takeaway flowing my be a pain. And it'd probably be more fun if the evenings involved eating out and a decent amount of beer? (something that I'm hoping the UK TIGJammers will be up for on at least one of the evenings!)

As someone who spends more time than most in isolated places (I have a rock climbing hobby), I can safely say that the caffiene and alcohol problems are easily resolved with minimal organisation.

Takeaway is less possible, but home cooking beats takeaway anyway.  You just need to make sure you have some people that can cook (I can!) with you and you'll be fine.

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

As a child I would look on hungrily when I'd hear tales of developers getting together for a weekend with all their computers to work together on stuff. I would read long passages of bouncing scrolling text talking about how they'd been awake all night and were hacking out some demo.

This is definitely appealing, but also a logistic pain. The number of people is probably as much of a problem as anything. 8 or less is probably reasonable to do, and maybe people could have the courage to leave their mobile phones at the base/sleeping location when they went off to the coding location. If a car journey was required then this could be made simpler.

You hear tales of these sorts of 'off the grid' camps, and they're popular as creepy team building exercises, but I can definitely see the appeal.

Speaking of which, how tricky is it to make an easily accessible local wifi intranet server? Can a laptop be set up to broadcast a wireless connection to have a shared folder, or is a peer to peer wireless network hard to do properly?

[Anthony Hart-Jones]

I have spare router or two lying around, legacy of changing ISPs, but I am pretty sure that you can set up a computer to act as an ethernet hub/router when you need it to.