What is a Coding Dojo?
- by huwyss
Recently i found out that there is a thing called "coding dojo". The point behind it is that software developers want to have a space to
learn new stuff like processes, methods, coding details, languages, and
whatnot in an environment without stress. Just for fun. No competition.
No results required. No deadlines.Some days ago I joined the Zurich coding dojo. We were three programmers with different backgrounds.We gave ourselves the task to develop a method that takes an input
value and returns its prime factors. We did pair programming and every
few minutes we switched positions. We used test driven development. The
chosen programming language was Ruby.I haven't really done TDD before. It was pretty interesting to see the algorithm develop following the testcases.We started with the first test input=1 then developed the most
simple productive program that passed this very first test. Then we
added the next test input=2 and implemented the productive code. We kept
adding tests and made sure all tests are passed until we had the
general solution.When we improved the performance of our code we saw the value of
the tests we wrote before. Of course our first performance improvement
broke several tests.It was a very interesting experience to see how other developers
think and how they work. I will participate at the dojo again and can
warmly recommend it to anyone. There are coding dojos all over the
world.Have fun!
