Tonight's meeting of the Software Craftsmanship Group was led by Uncle Bob Martin.

This time around we tried a Randori-style coding dojo. The task was to build a clock and, although we fell short of the original goal of having a GUI, there was plenty to be learned in this process.

I felt it was an interesting way to learn about your own performance under a moderate amount of pressure. More importantly, at least for me, was getting exposure to BDD and pairing with other developers that are a few step ahead of me on that particular road.

Once again, because I'm not a Ruby developer by day, I felt a little bit uneasy taking my turn and going up there to code a little bit. But I would not pass the experience, otherwise why even bother showing up for the event at all.

The whole thing was captured on tape. Hopefully the video will be made available and I'll come back and link to it here.

Remember one recent post when I talked about the Code Kata that I attended? Well, Micah prepared a screencast version of that Kata and that video is now available.

It's a short screencast (14') and even if Ruby is not your cup of tea, it's interesting to watch BDD being practiced.

I just came back from the first meeting of the Software Craftsmanship Group. Tonight Micah Martin talked about Code Kata but added an extra facet to it.

Micah proposes that, although practicing the Katas by yourself, in your spare time, is valuable, presenting your routine to an audience can deliver even more results. For the presenter there is the opportunity to gain feedback from the audience (peers, masters, even pupils.) For someone watching there's the chance of seeing another peer (or even a master) in action and learn how other developers approach problems and construct their software. By the way, it takes a non trivial amount of courage to sit in front of an audience and write code, even if you have practiced it several times beforehand.

To demonstrate this concept, Micah created a Ruby program that implemented Langton's Ant. I'll try to illustrate the results of this experience.

The audience - me (and many others)

Once Micah explained what the problem was, he asked that we watched him code and be prepared to evaluate his performance (quality, smoothness, clarity, etc.)

Although I know a little bit of Ruby, I'm by no means a proficient Ruby developer yet. Seeing someone that works with the language all the time in action would be interesting no matter what. But there was more in it for me.

Micah, as a true BDD pratictioner, started by creating the specs with RSpec and proceeded with the red/green/refactor iterations until he achieved a complete successful specification execution.

There's nothing like seeing a technology at work to understand it better. Tonight's performance contributed a lot for my BDD understanding.

The presenter

After the presentation we had to rate it (0 to 10) and give some feedback. There's where the other Ruby and BDD ninjas in the room could make educated comments about Micah's performance and average joes like myself could comment on less sophisticated issues like font size and keystrokes.

Judging by the constructive feedback, I'd imagine the presenter's future performances will be fine tuned and get better. On that note, the suggestion is that the presenter moves on to a different Kata for each performance.

Buncha' Links

• Code Kata
• RSpec
• Uncle Bob on Kata
• Coding Dojo
• Langton's Ant

It's so rare to find interesting group meetings up here in Suburbia that I can't pass the chance to attend new ones.

As Micah Martin announced, the Software Craftsmanship Group was created and the first meeting happens soon.

One of the topics for the evening will be Ruby Kata. Should be fun.