Lean Poker is this: you and a small group of strangers are going to develop a bot in a language of your choice, that plays poker against other bots. (Don't worry if you don't know poker, we will teach you.) All you need to do is write a function that takes a data structure containing cards and bets your bot sees during the game, and return a single number: the amount you are willing to bet at that point.
Now here is the catch: even before you start coding the bots play a round in a matter of seconds, and if your bot wins you get points. If it comes second, you get less points. Otherwise you get nothing. The next minute another game plays, and another one, and another one… that goes on all day long, while you and your friends are desperately hacking away on the code, and keep deploying, deploying, and deploying. Don’t worry about the deployment pipeline, that’s already set up for you.
During this pretty intense day you will sometimes be cheering for your bot to take over, you will be deploying desperately to change the course of events when your bot keeps losing, but even more importantly you will learn how to create as much value as you can in a short period of time, while you are mostly just having fun.
Please check out leanpoker.org for more information.
Rafael is a Lead Developer at Budapest-based Emarsys and popular speaker in the Hungarian software community. As a founding member of Emarsys CraftLab - the dedicated coaching team of Emarsys - he has taught university courses and lectured at numerous conferences. His passion for short feedback loops drove him to create Lean Poker, a workshop where developers have the opportunity to experiment with continuous delivery in an artificial environment.
