A Dojo – Learning Through Doing

On a snowy Thursday evening last week, I attended my first Coding Dojo at the offices of Sidekick Studios on Old Street. A coding dojo is a geekly gathering, coders of all abilities and backgrounds gathering together around a set of small problems (and usually lit by laptops), with the intention of pushing the boundries of what you know.

London Dojos

The London Python community has had a well regarded Coding Dojo on the first Thursday of every month for a while now, carefully nurtured by a top gentleman by the name of @ntoll. I met him at a hack day last year, where he and a friend explained the concept to me. Just over a month ago, that same friend had changed jobs, and was using Ruby in anger for the first time. He was eager to setup a Ruby Dojo for a) fun and b) to try and learn as much as he could.

Ruby Dojo

Since he’s a doing kinda guy, and his new company are into social good and like setting such things up, they went and set it up. The first thing I’ll say is that the DoJunior part isn’t in place yet. It’s a great approach to teaching and learning, and I’m interested in what will happen when it gets off the ground. The second thing I’ll say is that when you’re standing around a ping pong table, in an office decorated like a wooden playhouse from a 50’s American children’s show, and you only know the guy who is busy letting people in to the office, the easiest way to introduce yourself to people is to just butt into conversations.

“Hi, do you mind if I interrupt your conversation? Yeah? Too late now though isn’t it?”

Incidentally, if you want to run your own you might want to read the sage words of @ntoll, whom I mentioned during the intro.