Coding Dojo Outcome

Two Coding Dojos were cofacilitated by Ryan and myself.

The Dojos were:

1. Great fun and exciting too
2. An excellent opportunity for those who are shy; You're in front of an audience coding.
3. Best when the story / CodeKata was small, focused, and simple to work on
4. Better when the JUnit red bar indicated that the audience should not talk

Styles of writing code and tests were shared on the fly. New tricks were discovered.

In all, it was awesome!

Code Kata Quest for a Coding Dojo

In my quest to find Code Katas for an upcoming Coding Dojo at work, I searched quite a while for something suitable for our needs.

Dave Thomas' Back to the CheckOut at http://codekata.pragprog.com/ is good. The others there did not seem to exactly fit what we want right now. Either they were

• too academic (often single function solutions)
• the ramp up in explaining the problem was too high
  
• or there was no coding involved in solving the Kata

The other Code Katas of Dave's may be exactly what others are looking for.


Perhaps if the Klondike one at http://codekata.pragprog.com/2007/01/kata_twenty_klo.html was sectioned into several exercises, the ramp up of explaining the Kata would be manageable.

Looking elsewhere, I see http://www.codingdojo.org has a KataCatalogue. Nothing there that seemed to fit as of this writing (August 17, 2008).

In the future, looking at something like Head First books may be promising.