Friday, 8 March 2013

Our first public coding dojo


Tuesday evening saw NewVoiceMedia host its first public Coding Dojo, under the auspices of the Guildford Meetup Group.
Dojo literally translates from Japanese as “place of the way” (Wikipedia). It’s a place where students hone their skills in a given art. The art, in our case, is writing maintainable code. Dojo’s normally use katas to develop the skill: kata being the deliberate, repetitive practice of the technique, to improve one’s expertise in that area.
We were led by the excellent Chris Pitts who did a fantastic job of guiding the six students (four from NVM) through the FizzBuzz puzzle:
Output the numbers 1-100, but for numbers divisible by 3, output Fizz, and numbers divisible by 5, output Buzz. For numbers divisible by 3 and 5, output FizzBuzz.
This appears at first to be a very simple puzzle, which can be solved in under five minutes by an expert. Chris provided a great extension to this puzzle (applying the Single Responsibility and Open Closed Principles) that stretched even the most seasoned programmers present. All in all, it was a very fun and educational evening. The pizza and coffee was pretty good too!
We look forward to the next one!

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