This Wednesday (April 22nd) we’ll have another coding dojo at Skillsmatter. This time the challenge will be the Poker Hands: […] Your job is to compare several pairs of poker hands and to indicate which, if either, has a higher rank. Here’s some initial code generated at a previous dojo that may serve as starting point for the solution. The session format will be a Randori, which means everyone is welcome to code....
Reading Mark Needham’s post about how inexpressive an API can be when using booleans in method parameters, another clear example came to my mind. A few weeks ago we were using a method similar to the following: public List listUsers(boolean showDisabled); We’d expect that once you call this method passing false, it would return all enabled users and if the parameter is true it included all the disabled users in this list, right?...
Is it just me who’s loving this whole Ruby vs. Scala debate going on lately? So far it shows that: No language can prevent bad code. There will be never an ultimate language, but there will always be people to defend the one they are using. Java (the language, not the platform) is dead. I know it’s not the first time we have a language war and I have to confess I was missing that a little....
For this dojo, instead of working on a challenge from scratch, we’ll start from an existing solution and try to improve it. The starting point will be the Minesweeper implementation created on a previous coding dojo. It contains only 272 lines of Java code (source + tests) and a lot of room for improvement. Some guidelines for the session: Two programmers will work on the code for 7 minutes. After this period, one of them switch his place with someone from the audience....
We had some years to digest the Agile Manifesto. Now it seems like the next step is being defined in the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto: As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value: Not only working software, but also well-crafted software Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable....
One of the highlights of the Software Craftsmanship Conference 2009 came from outside the original programme. Someone had the excellent idea of proposing the following topic for an open space session: “Why I hate frameworks”. It was enough to get my attention and before I realised the room was so full that people had to sit on the floor to be able to participate. The discussion obviously started with frameworks for Java....
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....
The next open coding dojo at Skillsmatter will happen on 9th March (Monday). The registration is already open and the discussion about the coding challenge will take place on the mailing list.
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....
For the people wanting to practice their programming skills, the next open coding dojo will be this Thursday (12th) at the Skillsmatter office. After presenting a very interesting kata on the last session, Danilo Sato will be facilitating this dojo. Don’t forget to register on their website and join our mailing list if you want to know more about the challenge and the session format for this session.