Coding Katas
This past week, I've been conducting a series of coding katas, here in the India office. I wanted to organise something to give people the opportunity to hone their development skills on tasks that are not project-related. I also wanted to provide an environment whereby people could explore new programming languages, for which the kata exercises are proving to be perfect.
The sessions run for 2 hours each morning from 9-11 (in Bangalore, most projects are late starters to maximise the overlap with clients in Europe or North America). Participants spend the first 1.5 hours writing code and then gather for the last half hour while one or two people volunteer to share their solutions. So far, the katas have been challenging and fun, and a great learning experience.
As for me, I've decided to try and teach myself IronPython. I know, I know... everyone these days is learning Ruby. But it doesn't look like Ruby will be ported to .NET anytime soon and I really need a scripting language that will work under .NET (Smallscript seems to have stalled). Plus, I can leverage my understanding of the .NET Framework instead of having to learn a slew of custom class libraries.