“A coding dojo is a safe place to deliberately practice and develop your coding skills.”

I went to my first London Python Dojo last night and had a better time than I expected. I know a little Python (just enough to hurt myself). I was intrigued by this event where the idea was to learn together rather than just share knowledge.

The evening started off with beer and pizza, thanks to our hosts Fry-IT, and then moved on to two short presentations. The first was on FluidDb and the second was something to do with creating Python packages. Yes, both were over my head.

After that there was a short discussion about a problem to attempt. A blackjack game was suggested and we split into 5 groups of four and had a little under an hour to solve this. I didn’t have much confidence that we could do it. One person sat at a laptop, we spent about 5 minutes deciding on the approach to use and then the typing started.

I wouldn’t have been able to write the code as quickly as it was being knocked out, but I could understand it. And although we were all talking there were no arguments and we pushed through and got a working program done (with one easily fixed bug) just in time. Although not strictly pair programming, I can see why that approach can generate quality code quickly.

But that wasn’t it. Each team demoed their solution and showed their code. This was just as useful as writing the program in the first place. Because we had all been thinking about the same problem it was easy to understand the different approaches that were presented. There were class based solutions as well as functional ones (some had tests!) and we even saw the major development environments – Macs running vi, Linux machines with Emacs, and Notepad++ on Windows. We also saw a solution using Python3.

I enjoyed this more than I expected. It was nice to be able to contribute even though I’m not that experienced with Python, and I learned plenty just by watching and asking questions. It was a welcoming bunch and I will certainly be going again. And this time I’ll pay more attention to people’s names.

I don’t think anybody used version control, though…

At September’s NSCoder Night Alex Blewitt (@alblue on Twitter) gave a short presentation on the Git distributed version control system. Here are the slides as both a Keynote presentation and a PDF document.

Download the Keynote presentation (1.1 Mb)

Download the Slides as a PDF file (1.7 Mb)

Another month has gone by and it’s that time again. Tomorrow is the Third Tuesday of September which means NSCoder night.

And this week Alex Blewitt (@alblue) will be talking about DVCS and Git. Yes, that’s right; someone else is going to be talking about Git.

So come along for the usual collection (array or set, your choice) of chat, food, drink and learning. Nourishment for body and mind. And me telling you how you should always work on a private branch and that commit messages should be written in the present tense.

Where: The George Inn, Borough High Street
When: 6:30 pm onwards

Probably the last NSCoder Night of the summer started outside in the courtyard. A group got together for food at Pizza Hut beforehand and a couple more went to the Bunch of Grapes a little later on. It pays to watch the Twitter feeds to see what pre-meeting arrangements are being made.

After the usual chat outside we moved in to the Old Bar for Richard’s talk on Test Driven Development (sorry I spoke over you, Richard) which went well and generated some interesting discussion. Richard has made his slides availables here.
Next month’s talk is going to be about Git and distributed version control (not by me) and we may also have another talk lined up for the following month. If you have an idea for a talk you would like to give, please get in touch with me.

Let’s try and add something new to our NSCoder Nights — talks.

Our evenings don’t usually follow the norm of people all sat down and coding. I suppose that’s because of the choice of venue, but who would turn up for an evening in Starbucks?

I’ve got a couple of volunteers lined up for the next couple of meetings, but I thought it would be a good idea to put some draft ground rules down.

For Presenters:

Keep talks short and focussed. 15-20 minutes should be enough time. Think of it as being an initiator of the discussion that might follow.

Forget about any audio-video support. We are in a pub, where there are other people around. A few slides on your laptop or iPad is the most you have to work with. If you do a slideshow I’ll happily host the slides or post a link back to where you have them.

Don’t be offended if not everyone listens to your presentation, or scuttle off during it. Some people are just not interested in the topic, or are having a more interesting discussion somewhere else. The talks are not the point of the evening, just something that happens during the evening.

Be prepared to expand upon and explain your ideas further if someone asks.

For Listeners:

Don’t feel you have to listen to the talk if you don’t want to, but please don’t have a conversation over it. If you start listening and decide to bail, do so in the least disruptive way possible.

Ask questions, make comments, ask for help with related code. The presentations are necessarily short, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep talking about the topic.

If you feel you have something to talk about, let me know and I’ll add you to the list.

Upcoming Talks:

August – Richard Buckle on Test Driven Development
September – Alex Blewitt on Git/DVCS

If anyone has any amendments to propose for these rules or have subjects for talks, please let me know. See you on August 17th.

Last night’s NSCoder Night London was the smallest gathering yet. Not surprising considering that most regulars had been to NSConference Mini the previous Friday. It was also at a new place – The George Inn on Borough High Street because the Bunch of Grapes was showing football.

After spending the evening in the Old Bar which was mostly empty we thought we’d try and have the next meeting there as well. Far more space and quiet enough to hear everybody. This could have been because people had gone elsewhere to watch the football or were sitting on the benches outside to enjoy the clement weather. The downside was that the food wasn’t as good.

So, for next month, we’ll try and have the meeting at the George Inn and see how it copes with a larger group of people, and for those who turn up early they can go to the Bunch of Grapes for food. There is no point in trying to arrange dinner afterwards because people have got trains to catch.

The usual venue will be showing world cup football on our usual night so rather than put up with the a crowded upstairs room and droning vuvuzelas it seems a better idea to shift the meeting from one week. The suggestion is The George Inn on Borough High street. It’s just a couple of minutes further on from London Bridge station.

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The other idea I had was to gather on the embankment outside the London Assembly building. But the weather reports say it might be windy.

This is just a temporary location for a week.

I’ve been a bit quiet lately, but that doesn’t mean that the schedule has changed.

Tomorrow is the third Tuesday of the month, and that means another London Mac developer get together.

See you there.