Yesterday we had our first dojo in 2009 and once more people asked me when are the next sessions. So here they are: Wednesday, January 28th Thursday, February 12th Wednesday, February 25th Monday, March 9th Wednesday, March 25th The dates may change (they already did), so that’s one more reason to join our group or subscribe to this blog to be informed if that happens.
In an area dominated by acronyms like DRY, YAGNI, FIRST, SMART, KISS or catchy expressions such as Fake It Till You Make It and Baby Steps, a very important practice which is becoming forgotten is Programming By Intention: This is the practice of pretending that classes, functions, procedures etc. exist (even though they do not) as you structure and write your code. This helps a developer think about the overall process and larger steps of software rather than the small details....
Last Monday we had our first open coding dojo at Skillsmatter. Although we didn’t manage to decide all the details beforehand on the mailing list, I believe it worked pretty well for a first session. With 11 people attending, this dojo was challenging in different ways. The problem we tried to solve was the BankOCR, which only two or three people had tried to solve beforehand. The language was Ruby, which most people didn’t have tried before....
How do you tell if a team is agile? If the last years trying to follow the principles of the manifesto taught me something is that in a good software project people want to be accountable. We’re knowledge workers. What we deliver is a direct result of the perception of the problems we are exposed to. Yet, there are a lot of people trying to escape from the responsibilities our job requires....
Thanks to Gojko and the guys from Skillsmatter I’ll be running a regular coding dojo in London. The challenges, languages, session formats and any other related topic will be discussed in the new coding-dojo-london group, so if you’re interested in attending any session or learning more about how the dojo works, it’s a good idea to subscribe. My idea with this group is also help people interested in running other dojos in the city....
After using TextMate in the last weeks I still miss some Eclipse shortcuts. I want to do a specific task and don’t know an easy way to do it without using the mouse or navigating through the menu to find if such shortcut exists. Then today I read an article (in Portuguese) about a blind programmer. Yes, a blind programmer. Can you imagine how hard it would be trying to develop a software without seeing it?...
Then is time to visit TDD Problems: The aim of this site is to contain a growing collection of software problems well-suited for the TDD-beginner to learn Test-Driven Development through problem solving. Today the site contains 20 different “real-life” problems, which is probably enough to keep anyone busy for a long time. And since it was announced in the testdrivendevelopment list only a few days ago, it’s very likely the list will keep growing....
In the last months I’ve been in touch with a lot of people trying to start their own coding dojos. Here’s some tips for those who already started or are considering it: Setting up You don’t need much more than a place with one computer connected to a projector and enough sits for people attending. A timer to keep track of the pair rotation and a white board or flip chart to discuss the problem are also very useful....
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: The Page Object design pattern in details How to use Selenium Grid on the Amazon EC2 Configuring tests to run in parallel using TestNG
In his talk at the Agile2008, Bob Martin proposed an addition to the Agile Manifesto: Craftsmanship over Crap. Although most of us can identify with that statement, it’s probably not easy to sell the idea put that way. But now he rephrased it to: Craftsmanship over Execution. I confess the first time a thought about software development being a craft was in a Joel Spolsky’s article disagreeing with the use of this term....