March Coding Dojo Summary

Last night was our groups first Coding Dojo and it went really well and I think everyone got something out of it.

For the curious people were given a choice of one of the following Katas to do:

http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataPotter

http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataMinesweeper

http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataBankOCR

We then grouped everyone into kata clusters based on their choices so that people working on the same kata were in the same room and could talk about design and implementation issues together.

The clusters then tackled their katas via two 40 minute sessions with a pizza break in between and time at the end to talk about what they learned.

What was great to see was that almost everyone elected to work in a pair (or a trio) and that people were trying to use techniques and approaches that they hadn’t tried before.  We even had one pair attempt the Minesweeper kata using F# (with tests in C#) even though they had never written a line of F# code before! Sweet!

The camaraderie on display was excellent, as was the joking and fun, and the when the kata clusters talked with each other about how they went it was great seeing such openness from people about what they screwed up and what they learned.

For everyone who came – thank you for making it such a great and enjoyable night!!