Coding Is Like Cooking

I’m off to Oslo on Wednesday for Smidig 2009. They’ve just announced the programme, which consists of lightning talks in the morning, and open space in the afternoons. I’ll be giving a lightning talk on Friday morning about why you might want to go to a coding dojo. I’m hoping there will be enough interest to run a Randori/dojo in the afternoon. Someone commented that there have been dojo meetings in Oslo before, so I’ll be interested to find out if they do them the same way I’ve been doing them.

The conference talks are mostly going to be in Norwegian, but mine isn’t the only item in Swedish. I spotted Ola Ellnestam (agical) and Thomas Nilsson (responsive) on the list too. So if it turns out that I find spoken Norwegian totally incomprehensible, there will be a few people I can talk to!

I had a fantastic time at XP2009 in Sardinia, but I didn’t find time to blog much about it until now. I just wrote a report of my TDD workshop on jsolutions.se.

I’m looking forward to Europython in Birmingham at the end of June. Geoff and I are going to be rather busy at it. They’ve just published the programme, and between us we are holding 5 sessions. I’m running a “coder’s dojo“, a “clean code challenge”, and Geoff and I are doing a tutorial on texttest together. Geoff is also giving talks about texttest and pyUseCase.

The coder’s dojo session is a copy of the original XP2005 workshop by Laurent Bossavit and Emmanual Gaillot, only in python with different Katas. The structure is the same though – introduction, prepared Kata, randori, retrospective. I thought it worked really well in 2005, so why change a winning format?

The clean code challenge is an idea I came up with. I’ve written on this blog before about KataArgs, and my dodgy python translation of Bob Martin’s code. I’m interested to know what the python community will make of it. I’m basically planning to throw this code out to anyone who turns up, and ask them to refactor it into better python. I’m of course hoping they will produce some innovative, beautifully pythonic solutions, and show me what clean code looks like in python.

The tutorial on texttest is essentially similar to the one Geoff and I did at Europython in 2005. It’s longer though, a half day, and builds on all the experience we have had since, doing tutorials at XP2006 and agile2008 for example.

All in all, I hope we’ll have some time and energy left to go to the other items in the programme. It looks like being a busy conference.

As I wrote in a previous post, I am organising a workshop at XP2009 called “Test Driven Development: Performing Art”. I am very pleased to announce that I have four pairs of expert programmers willing to perform prepared Katas at it! You can read about it here. I am especially pleased that all the performers are experienced coders with previous involvement in coding dojos in places such as Stockholm, Linköping, London, São Paulo and Helsinki. I think we’re going to have a great afternoon on 27th May.

I’m looking for some really good coders. People who can write outstanding code, and yet know that however good they are they can always get a little bit better with a little practice, feedback and reflection. The kind of coders that attend a coding dojo and practice on code katas.

Interested? Could be persuaded to attend XP2009? Take a look at this call for participation.