Coding Is Like Cooking

I’m planning to start a new dojo this autumn, called JDojo@Gbg. I was inspired by the guys at Responsive in Linköping, who I met at XP2009. They have been running a dojo for some time now, and find it is an excellent way to introduce programmers from their clients to the ideas of Test Driven Development. I think we could do with more test infected programmers about the place in Göteborg, too.

I already run a dojo as part of GothPy, and Got.rb also runs regular Kata/dojo evenings, but because those programming languages are not mainstream, many developers wouldn’t consider coming along. That is why the new dojo is explicitly going to use Java, or at least, the JVM platform.

I’m thinking about what Katas we are going to tackle at the new dojo, and last night I had a go at KataFizzBuzz in Java. It is an extremely simple problem to solve, and initially I thought it was too easy to be a Kata actually. Then at agile2008 I was looking around for a Kata that Michael Feathers and I could perform in 4 minutes for the “Programming with the Stars” competition, and it seemed to fit the bill. I was quite pleased we got done in that short amount of time (in python of course 🙂

A couple of people have commented that this Kata is actually quite good for teaching TDD, just because it is so simple to solve. People are forced to think about TDD instead of the problem. It can easily be made more interesting by adding new requirements too. So I think I might try it out at JDojo@Gbg.

I just wrote a report about europython on my company blog.

Today at europython we listened to a keynote about Bletchley Park. This was the centre of British and allied codebreaking activities during the second world war, and where the first digital, programmable computer was built, Colossus. We heard about the current financial plight of the museum there, and the need for investment to renovate the huts that amongst others Alan Turing worked in. Dr Sue Black told us about her experiences trying to help lobby the government for more money for Bletchley park, using social networking, blogs and twitter. She recounted that she had recently met an elderly gentleman, one of the surviving codebreakers. She told us how close she felt to history when he related a story about when he was decoding a nazi message during the war, and his shock when he got to the end and discovered the message was signed “Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer”.

As a professional programmer, I think the site where the first digitally programmable computer was built has to be a place worth preserving. I hope that people will be able to visit there and see the reconstructed Colossus computer and be inspired by the stories of innovation and codebreaking that it enabled.

It was particuarly poignant for me to think about this when in the next session I checked my email and found a message from my mother saying that my grandmother died this morning. She was a living link to the history of the second world war for me. During the war she was a wireless operator, transmitting and receiving messages in morse code. And now she is not there any more. I am kind of in shock. But it just confirms for me that we need museums like the one at Bletchley Park to retain contact with our history.

(I wrote this post yesterday)

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 at XP2009 this week, the sun is shining, the sea is blue and the italians are disorganized. I’m having a great time so far. This morning I was at a workshop led by Danilo Sato and Francisco Trindade – ‘The lego lean game’. The idea was that we should learn about lean principles by playing with lego. I thought it was good fun, and we did learn quite a bit about pull, kanban and continuous improvement. I hope I will be able to run this simulation for some of my colleagues, I think it is a good practical way of learning using all the senses, not just reading books or listening to presentations. Much more kinesthetic.