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Coding dojo - Dictionary

I conducted an Open registration coding dojo in Pune, last Saturday. This was a short four hour dojo.

The topic for the dojo was Dave Thomas' Kata Eight. As always we started with a discussion and design session and started coding. As we worked on the solution, several interesting learning opportunities came up:

  • Designing for readability

  • Using the decorators in Java's IO library

  • Using various collection classes and understanding their performance characteristics

  • Iterating through collections using an Iterator (we will also touch upon the Iterator design pattern)

  • Design tradeoffs to make code faster

  • Various coding conventions

  • Some programming best practices

  • Refactoring support in Eclipse

Many thanks to ITVidya.com for organizing the dojo and to Pune IT Labs for hosting it. 

Participants feedback showed that everyone though coding dojos offer a much better learning mechanism than traditional lectures. Everyone enjoyed the practice oriented approach. Some people found the exercise a bit simple and said they would prefer to deal with more complex topics like "web based development" and "Enterprise Java". Some participants would have prefered a greater time duration.

Thanks to all the participants for your feedback. I will try and incorporate your suggestions in forthcoming dojo sessions. 

Please stay tuned if you would like to participate in the  next open dojo. I will announce it here as soon as soon as the date is finalized.



Note: This text was originally posted on my earlier blog at http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net
Here are the comments from the original post

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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Freeman Murray
EMAIL:
URL: http://wheresfreeman.blogspot.com
DATE: 05/15/2007 05:12:55 AM
This is great !! When is the next one ?
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Parag
DATE: 05/15/2007 06:01:16 AM
Hello Freeman,

Thanks for your comment and interest in the coing dojo. I do plan to have an open registration dojo again, but have not yet been able to set a date.

I will announce it on this website as soon as I am able to schedule it.

--
Regards
Parag
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