On October I’ll have another great reason to travel: running a coding dojo at the Latin-American Conference on Agile Development Methodologies (or simply Ágiles2009). And if having an event like that in back in Brazil wasn’t good enough, the conference will be in Florianópolis, the city where I studied and used to work before moving to London. How cool is that?
For this session, it seems like once more the challenge will be how to prepare a session for more people than we’re used to. So Victor Hugo and I still have to come up with something special for this occasion.
Anyway, If you’re lucky enough to be around at the conference, please don’t hesitate and come say hi 
Work
Coding Dojo, Talks
This session was a mix of talk and coding dojo, in order to give a hands on experience following the rest of this conference’s approach. As a result, this 45-minute dojo became the shortest coding dojo I’ve organised so far.
It was also the first time I’ve tried to start a dojo with an existing piece of code. This code was simple, incomplete, naive and desperately asking for refactoring. It helped keeping the session flow since the first minute, mainly because it took only a couple of seconds for the first pair to learn the code and figure out ways to improve it.
One fact that surprised me as well was how most of the 20 people present was afraid of participate. Being at a craftsmen conference and knowing the benefits of the coding dojo, I really expected people would compete for a chance to show their skills. At our regular dojos people work in harder problems and new languages and still don’t get intimidated. Well, maybe it takes some time to overcome the fear of coding in public.
This session also confirmed my theory that the Minesweeper problem is really one of the best to introduce a coding dojo to new people: it involves simple algorithms, simple data structures and has plenty of room to apply basic OOP and TDD techniques.
Finally, here are some other resources from the session:
- Slides (quick introduction to coding dojo + randori rules)
- Minesweeper problem description
- Source code – initial and final code generated at the session; download and keep playing with it.
Work
Coding Dojo, Talks
Next Thursday I’ll be running a coding dojo at the Software Craftsmanship 2009. My goal is to discuss why people should organise dojos at their companies and learn more about alternative approaches people are using to improve programming skills.
It seems like it’ll be an interesting event:
This conference is all about the principles and practices, and the disciplines and habits, that distinguish the best 10% of software professionals from the 90% who are failing their customers and failing their profession by taking no care or pride in their work and delivering buggy, unreliable and unmaintainable code.
If you managed to save your spot (registration are now closed), see you there!
Work
Coding Dojo, Talks
If you’re interested on the slides I’ve used on yesterday’s presentation about my tips on Selenium RC, you can download them here.
If you want to learn more about the practices I mentioned, here are some useful links:
Work
Page Objects, Patterns, Programming, Selenium, Talks, TDD, Testing