A Code Dojo is meant to be a group learning exercise to learn new techniques and improve your old ones. I have neither so I should be able to gain great benefit from attending. The format of the learning can vary although I believe traditional Dojo's are meant to practice one particular technique over and over again.
This Dojo was organised by Nicholas Tollervey and others (sorry I can't remember everyone's names and I don't know who did what) and took the format of writing a Tic-Tac-Toe game. Only one person would write code at a time, the pilot, and a second co-pilot could sit next to them and make suggestions. However there was a third co-pilot which was everyone else in the room who could see the code you were writing on a massive projector. Hence, geeks being geeks, what you wrote was both wrong, correct, absurd and brilliant. Each person had 10 minutes to write code, or pass a particular test whichever came first.
There were about 20-30 people attending, and first off we all got stuck into the beer and pizza. Which was delicious. Soon after the social formalities were out of the way we were beckoned to the Dojo area to begin.
A lot of group discussion was involved on very developer orientated topics, when to write tests, what tests to write, what game are we playing, how should we check for this, that or the other. Honestly a lot went over my head, but I got the overall theme of the discussions and managed to learn one of two things about testing code and Test Driven Development
My Python-fu is not as developed as most of the attendees however I can see a geek-gag when I see it. My one and only contribution to the code base worth mentioning was the print statement that would be displayed when the code ran.
"Do you want to play a game?"
Which got enough laughs for me to be happy. I can't honestly remember what other code I wrote, but it didn't work!
During my turn the suggestions from the other attendees would come at a phenomenal pace, however I can the calm Marcus at my side making clearer suggestions than the "wisdom of crowds" in front of me.
To encourage participation and prevent "wall flowers" there was a prize draw to every participant who coded at the front. You name was put in a hat and you got the chance of winning your choice of O'Reily book (Kindly donated by Josette Garcia from O'Reily of international conference fame), IronPython in Action (signed by the authors) or some management twaddle book.
I got pick out of the hat first so I am the proud ownwer of the Python Cookbook!
After the Dojo quite a few of us went to the Doggett's Coat and Bade for a drink, which left me feeling worse for wear this morning, so much that I was a little late for work. Getting to know the other participants made me feel like I've arrived in London and starting to integrate.
Nicholas Tollervey and company did a tremendous job organising the Dojo and it would not have go so smoothly without their prior effort. Nicholas explained how they are going to be adapting the Dojo as they host them and made a raft of changes since the last one. I can only see the events improving as the experience of the crew grows.
I'm certainly looking forward to the next event which will be in a few weeks.
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West Bromwich Mapping Party - This Weekend.
Birmingham is done. What next? West Bromwich and the Black Country of course!
To help us on our way a Cloudmade sponsored mapping party is happening at The Public, map(Very Rough!) in West Bromwich centre this weekend, 4th and 5th April.
(If you look at the map link given, you can see that West Brom town centre is very poorly mapped. That will have to change!)
This mapping party is welcoming anyone and everyone to help us. Walkers, pensioners, students and families! Remember the first rule of OpenStreetMap is to "Have fun!". If you'd like to take part just come along, preferably with a pen and paper. There are GPS devices available for loan, and if you have your own even better. A digital camera or Dictaphone are also very useful.
The OSM Midlands User Group has set themselves the challenge of mapping the West Bromwich and Black Country area before Christmas 2009.
Andy Robinson (Blackadder) has already divided up the region and produced the cake[1]. There is a massive total of 284 segments, of which 17 have been done by Andy and Brian Prangle.
To complete the map by Christmas we need to do about 7 segments a week! And that is more than manageable I believe. And the mapping party will get us off to a good start.
See you there!
[1] A cake in OSM is not edible. It is a map of the region that has been divided up using easily distinguishable landmarks, such as main roads, rivers, canals, motorways etc. This means that a coordinated attempt can be taken to map an area, without the likely hood of repeated effort. Plus they look pretty cool.
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I've been a bit rubbish lately and have not said anything about the Birmingham Hack Space.
We've had our first organisation meeting at the Bull Inn. Which I turned up 2 and a half hours late to, but everyone else seemed happy with how the meeting went. The minutes for it are here.
Since then we had our first actual hacking meeting, which Nikki Peugh hosted. She kindly lent us the use of her flat, she provided wifi, we provided food. That was the deal.
There were four of us in attendance, Nikki, Antonio (hellocatfood), Charlie and myself.
Antonio and Charlie concerned themselves with Processing (Processing is a scripting language for the Computer Science impaird, ie graphic artists and normal people) and Python ( a programming language for the everything impaired, ie me).
Nikki and I tried to get the counting iguanas to RFID system she had made to work. Iguanas with a fetching RFID badge, would walk past a reader and this would be tallied. An officious Walrus would come along and check this number, and publish it to Twitter. Nikki had got the code from a friend, and had it working on one computer. However when transferred to the computer doing the work, it stopped. The problem (after a couple of hours fiddling) was found to be in how Windows deals with spaces in pathnames. But we got it working, and now Nikki and her Walrus can count Iguanas to the hearts content.
The next hacking meeting is going to be at Linux Emporium. John Pinner has kindly let us use his company offices. There is a poll to show your support for a particular day. The poll will be closed on the 23rd March, so be quick!
See you then!
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The 3rd and final day of the Birmingham Bug Jam, and it was much quieter this time around. Myself, Quentin, John Pinner and Chris "Baggers" were the only ones here to start. Chris was hardcore and actually spent the night in Linux Emporium though I don't know if he actually got any bugs triaged. Hellocatfood, from IRC, joined us later in the afternoon and got he managed to get a few hours of bug triaging in.
We set up the webcam stream so that the bug hunters in London could interact with us, and kudos to them (and Tim Williams) for setting up another webcam stream from London. We had two-way communication which really added to the atmosphere, and made it feel more of a global event. Having comments being shouted from London, and us laughing back made us really feel that we were part of a larger group, working together to the same ends. There were also others that joined in from home via the webcam and IRC.
Food wise, we had more tasty food this time a huge pizza that had to be halved so it fitted in the oven, burgers, and chocolate cake. Washed down by beers provided by Chris.
Chris got distracted again and started to juggle some penguins.
I felt that I got more bug triaging done today then yesterday. I felt more confident posting comments and changing status'.
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It's Saturday and we're hunting bugs in Birmingham! The day kicked off around 10 O'Clock at Linux Emporium (facilities kindly provided by John Pinner) with everyone getting stuck into bugs on Launchpad. Mez gave a quick how-to on bug triaging to a few of us. Unfortunately it seemed that everyone else on the interest was being just as enthusiastic and the Launchpad servers couldn't handle the load. The Canonical monkeys got it sorted eventually so we got back to bug zapping.
Tim Williams of Autotrain and SBLug set up the room with a streaming webcam, so that the whole world can watch - and listen! - to our bug hunting. This essentially meant we spent a good while irritating the London Bug Jammers by eating tasty lasagne, chocolate cake, drinking beer and juggling penguins.
I only managed to triage about 9 bugs today, it's still very much early days for me but I still think I helped. Most of the triaging I did was to file the bugs against what I thought was the correct package, and changing the status, asking for more info. Quentin and Nick were able to actually have a more in-depth stab at the bugs, because we had a wide variety available in the Linux Emporiums office, reporting back more specific information that should hopefully help developers when they come to fix the bugs.
Mez and Zeth also spent a bit of time interviewing the bug jammers for a podcast they are preparing to release.
Later in the day we had a surprise visit from Henrik Omma who helped me understand a little more about Launchpad, and helped me by setting a few bugs to "wishlist".
Hopefully tomorrow I will be more confident with setting bug status, and asking for more information.
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