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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