Date: March 17, 2023
There are no previous sessions
In the words of the original creators of the concept, Emmanuel Gaillot and Laurent Bossavit:
A Coding Dojo is a meeting where a bunch of coders get together to work on a programming challenge. They are there to have fun and to engage in Deliberate Practice in order to improve their skills.
In other words, it's a kind of workshop where we code together "something" but where the emphasis is not on the results but on the practices, tools and techniques used. Traditionally, Coding Dojos are great to practice Test-Driven Development, Pair Programming, and Collective Code Ownership which are cornerstones of eXtreme Programming, but of course there's room for exploring and learning other techniques.
It's very simple, here is an outline of the process:
- ~2 minutes: Next session
- ~10 minutes: Retrospective
- ~10 minutes: Decide on a topic for this session
- 40 minutes or so: Code together
- 5-10 minutes: Mid-session break to discuss how things are going
- 40 minutes or so: Code some more
- 5 minutes: Closing
The meat of the Dojo is the coding part, of course, which usually follows one of the following patterns:
- A Prepared Kata whereby someone has prepared something they want to present
- A Randori Kata where coding happens in group, people taking turn at the keyboaard in a round-robin fashion