Another Day, Another Dojo

My first Dojo of 2010 yesterday, as I missed the January one (which is a shame as it sounded like fun). This was a return to the conventional Dojo style with pair-programming at the front, the task being to merge the Adventure Game efforts from the previous month’s team-by-team effort. But first, a commercial break… Jonathan Hartley advertised the upcoming PyWeek competition and demonstrated his team’s previous effort as well as the amusingly literal Murder of Crows entry.

Meanwhile, back at the Dojo… Nicholas started off partly to set things up for people (like me, his co-pilot) who hadn’t been there the month before. As we moved through the programming pairs, we did manage to get a working codeset together by merging the location-parsing code from one team with the cmd-based loop from another. But it was clear that things were moving slowly and that the audience was somewhat disengaged…

So we finished off with a broad discussion of ways ahead, of what might work better, and of whether the artificial nature of the Dojo setting meant that people couldn’t “show off”, so to speak, their natural coding style — and ability. Michael G and others made a few cogent suggestions to the effect that smaller teams would work better but with some kind of DVCS (git seemed to be the front-runner) to assist the teams in collaborating. And it seemed that at least one team should be creatives, rather than coders.

I enjoyed it, as ever, but it _is_ difficult to keep 20+ people in a medium-sized room totally engaged. Even with the best will in the world, it’s hard to read code on a screen from some distance back. This was one of the reasons why a team-based approach met with broad approval. Also it is a little dispiriting when you’re doing your best up front but half your “audience” is otherwise engaged.

The point about how “natural” you should be in the Dojo was interesting. Everyone has a different way of coding, of approaching a problem, of looking for information and so on. Dave[*], the last pilot, mentioned that he’d normally take much longer sizing a problem up but that having a time limit forced him into action sooner. But you’re up there with a limit of 10 minutes, probably on someone else’s machine, maybe on an “alien” operating system. You’re fumbling with running up a command prompt; you’re not sure how to bring up the Python docs; the keyboard shortcuts which your fingers remember don’t work — or worse, do something else entirely! We did discuss each person bringing up his own laptop, although that has obvious drawbacks of getting the projector to switch smoothly and so on. It was out of this discussion that the move towards a team-based approach next time arose.

TJG

[*] Dave, incidentally, was the programmer of the BBC version of the Graphics Adventure Creator — did you know that?