What is a Coding Dojo?
A Coding Dojo is a place / meeting for programmers to engage together on
deliberate practice of their craft. Expect to do Test Driven Development, Pair
Programming and other practices well known from Agile development methodologies
together with other people.
It’s meant to be fun and to help everyone improve their coding skills.
All skill levels are welcome.
When and where
23rd of April, 2015 — 18:30 at Printbox,
Rynek Główny 17, Kraków
Please register at: http://pydojo-krk-apr-2015.eventbrite.com
In the very first minutes we will give a brief introduction
explaining how the process work, with very few rules, and then we start coding.
Do not bring your computer, you don’t need it, and it would be just one more
distraction in the era of smartphones and everyone always connected...
A bit of context
It all began with the question "why programmers do not practice?" If you look
at high performance athletes, you’ll realize that they practice everyday in
order to stay sharp at what they do. Think about runners, swimmers, fighters,
and even chess players.
Communities of coding dojos have been formed around the world. A well known
group started meeting in Paris in 2004. In 2008, a coding dojo was born in Rio
de Janeiro - with non-stop meetings every week since then.
Now we want to bring a coding dojo environment to Pykonik meetings in Kraków.
Formats
The two most common formats to run a coding dojo are kata and randori.
In a kata, someone comes to the meeting to demonstrate to the audience the
steps how to solve some problem, and the audience should leave the dojo being
able to reproduce the solution. It’s kind of a demo... it’s good but it can be
better.
In a randori, we have one single computer and projector, and a pair works on
time-boxed turns (5~7 min). After each turn, someone from the audience replaces
one from the pair and the dynamic continues. That’s the format we’re going to
use.
Important things to keep in mind:
- Continuous learning
- Safe environment
- No competition
- Collaboration
- Inclusive
- Failure and redundancy
- Baby steps
Objectives:
- Practice
- Learn
- Teach
- Discuss based on actual code (avoid abstract conversations)
What NOT to do:
- Rush to finish the problem
- Work on somebody’s "real life" problem
- Flamewars
- Compete with other participants
- Have anyone in the session lost in understanding the current state of the
code base
At the end of the session we conduct a retrospective to understand collectively
what we’ve learned, what did we like, what could be better, etc. And after
that, it’s common to spend more time together and socialize.
Sponsor
Printbox kindly offers us their office space for a
venue and provides snacks.
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