Bar Camp and Code Kata
Today, a friend and I caught the second half day of Bar Camp (Bar Camp Block). I'll post some comments on this event shortly (feel free to add your own as well -- this is a wiki after all).
Also later while I was browsing books at Borders, I had an "ah ah" moment when I stumbled onto this comment made by some Mathematician called W. W. Sawyer.
Incidentally, for anyone learning algebra, it is often more instructive to work one problem by three or four different methods than to work out three problems in a row.
This is a theme that I keep on running into these days. In order to learn effectively, one has to practice on the same problem over and over again using as many techniques as one can come up with. The actual learning comes from the comparison and the contrasting (not the just the repetition) of those techniques*. Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt make the same point in our field of computer programming. Dave calls these programming practice sessions Code Katas.
This is the reason I've been learning Haskell and Erlang. Learning Haskell has already given me some benefits. I feel I'm now able to implement coldfusion code in a much clearer and organized way because of the difference I've experienced in Haskell.
(I will also come back to this part later to further distill some of my thoughts on this issue).
* Note. By saying that it's "not just the repetition of those techniques" that's useful. I didn't mean to say that repetition hasn't its uses -- repetition definitely has its uses.(Upcoming Event) Super Happy Dev House #19
Ok, I'm here right now. I've been mostly going from person to person -- talking to people.
In between conversations, I've been studying a little bit of Haskell.
If anyone wants to find me, I'm in the room with the piano, and I'm wearing a black hawaian shirt with some flowers on it.
Also, if anyone is interested in another event like this one, I'd suggest you take a look at Bar Camp (coming up very soon) and a look at PyWeek (make your own Python game hackathon -- although sadly this event doesn't seem to be geographically-based). Depending on our workload, I will try to take a couple of days off to participate in PyWeek.
http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse19
Super Happy Dev House #18
Super Happy Dev House #16 and #17
I'm currently attending Super Happy Dev House (May 5th, 2007). I was hoping I would learn more about Spoon, since Craig Latta is also attending this event, and I got the web server part of Spoon working, but I couldn't get the rest of it working yet...
Otherwise, I think I'm going to spend the rest of the evening working on Smalltalk Unit Testing, using Kent Beck's classic book written on the subject.
Here is a picture of me from the last SHDH (I'm in the middle wearing the black shirt)
We're in the San Francisco Bay Area
I live in Alameda and work in Berkeley. Occasionally, I can be found at Bay Area XP, coldfusion user group, and tiny XP meetings.
Stephan
Consulting
The seedwiki site is only a part (the public part) of our business. Most of our income comes from our consulting. Kenneth and I prefer to work with our clients locally. We do Access database and web application work, but we try to be solutions-oriented and we're pretty much open to any rapid application development environments.
In almost everything we do, we use our wiki platform to have our clients build their own interface and change it as frequently as they can. However we also strongly believe in frequent face-to-face contact. We build everything iteratively, and our process demands lots of frequent feedback and on-site testing.
Last Blog Posts
>this is a test for keep formatting code
