Re: [tlug] QQ - consider it a poll (TDD)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephenjturnbull@example.com>]

Edward Middleton writes:
 > On 11/11/21 13:26, David Blomberg (dblomber) wrote:

 > > I was wondering if anyone here has been part or used TDD (coding Dojo)

?? I thought TDD = test-driven development.

 > > and/or hack-a-thon type of environments as a way to bring together 
 > > beginner, middle, and experienced programmers to learn and practice 
 > > programming skills

I can't speak to Coding Dojo, but I've found that participating in and
leading coding sprints for ongoing projects is a valuable experience.
(This backs up Edward's point below.)  There are always more or less
trivial bugs that new programmers can work on, and for the very newest
you can always do pair programming with them as the typist.  It takes
a couple of senior people with serious volunteer spirit to onboard the
newbies rather than dive right into the hacking, but in my experience
work gets done and people have a lot of fun.

One thing I was really impressed by was a Python conference where some
sponsor funded a MicroPython room with a bunch of Adafruit or similar
devices.  I spent my time at the core sprint, but one of my friends
(professionally a lawyer fascinated with open source licensing and a
husband employed by Red Hat at the time) said she never understood for
loops until she made the lights blink different colors.  (insert WTF
emoji here) I have no clue how she can feel that way :-) but it seems
like a valuable insight for this discussion since clearly at least one
intelligent human being does feel that way.  I wonder if Curt (or any
other of the folks who do hardware whether as a product or
retrocomputing) have similar stories?

I don't think a Logo turtle would have had the same effect on her,
BTW.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hack-a-thon," but my impression would
be a couple of folks say "let's do it", organize some refreshments
and a room, and a couple dozen people show up.  Doesn't sound too
enjoyable to me.

On the other hand, I think the Dojo metaphor is interesting -- doing
"kihon" = basic programming exercises, "kata" = set ("contrived")
problems, and "kumite" = sprinting against production code, but does
anybody really provide that?  It sounds like a pile of unrewarding
work for the senseis, that in a formal educational context (presumably
involving 100,000s of yen in tuition) could be quite effective.  But
in an informal setting, a sprint open to all comers would provide the
same three dimensions (although with different implementations: kihon
= browse the tracker, kata = triage, kumite = sprint on code), with
zero prep (except venue and refreshments) for the leaders.

 > I understand the idea of Coding Dojo's but it always felt to me
 > like you could get the same experience working on problems that you
 > really cared about rather then contrived problems designed to fit
 > the format.

I think this can work in formal educational settings, and also
possibly in certain groups.  Eg, I think (some?) PyLadies groups run
sessions where they teach programming on the basis of simple exercises
like "write a program to print the numbers from 1 to 10 in two
lines".  But this is more about getting women to get past the social
expectation that "women can't/don't code" as I understand it.