NJ Geeks - New Jersey's IT Community

Not too long ago, I formed the .NET Meetup so I could meet other .NET local developers, learn a few tricks, and work on improving my .NET skills.  We've been meeting weekly, and until recently had a very loose agenda where we were supposed to form ad hoc groups and work on projects.  Unfortunately, that didn't work too well insofar as even self-organizing teams need structure.  That led me to conceive of something I call Pair-Programming Shu-Ha-Ri, based on some of the concepts of pair-programming and Martin Fowler's write-up on Shu-Ha-Ri.

Tonight we put the idea into practice, and I think it went pretty well despite the lack of Masters/Guides.  The main goal for the evening was to be productive and pass down knowledge and technique, and from the feedback I got, I think that was accomplished.  We broke up into two teams where there were two students/laptop and a guide for the team.  Each team brain stormed an idea, and the master guided the team to breaking down the idea into clear defined goals.  Each team then created a mock-up and some of the teams got started on writing unit tests using NUnit.

From talking to the novices, they seemed to appreciate how the session focuses on the Master showing the Student how to be productive using the Master's methods.  Concepts are explained when necessary, but only enough to complete the task.  There are better ways to learn concepts, these sessions are all about learning technique.  A number of the Students never used NUnit or had done test-driven development before, and a few mentioned they will be doing more test-driven development with NUnit in the future.

I'm looking forward to the next session, but I would like to see more Masters/Guides come out so the teams are more of a 1-on-1 experience.

  My friend Dossy introduced to Shu-Ha-Ri sometime in the last year.  From Martin Fowler's blog, he says, "Shu-Ha-Ri is a way of thinking about how you learn a
technique."  The idea is a student should go through 3 phases when learning something new. 

• Shu involves doing exactly what your master tells you to do so you learn his technique.
• Ha involves branching out, learning new techniques and focusing on the theory.
• Ri is where the student doesn't learn from a master but branches out on his own and learns from his own experiences.

   We started a weekly studying/coding group a month back and it's already grown to 7 people.  To help the group be successful, I started thinking it might be a good idea to incorporate a little ShuHaRi into our little session, but adapt it to the principles behind Pair Programming.

Pair Programming Shu-Ha-Ri Rules

1. Break up into teams comprised of 1 experienced developer (Master) and 1 less-experienced developer (Student).
2. The Student sits at the keyboard, the Master will dictate to the student what to do.
3. The Student is responsible for setting the agenda.  He tells the Master what he wants to work on (Task List, Web Crawler, etc.). The task can be something he worked on over several weeks, but it should be small.
4. The Master will break up the Student's goal into small workable pieces.  The Master will break these pieces up into very specific and small realistic goals that can be accomplished in an evening.
5. The Master will guide the Student to finishing the goals for the evenings and the Student will do it in the way the Master tells him.

This month Martin will be leading us into a discussion about a few MySQL topics, some which may include a presentation:

I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I know) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who. ---by Rudyard Kipling  I like this quotation. The search for knowledge is endless and very fruitful. I've found that working in IT requires that I know these "serving-men" and I believe you should too!!

I've finally gotten around to setting up Drupal and using it as the primary portal for the NJ Geeks website. My goals are fairly simple in that I want to start publishing a lot of information for people to find local tech events.

I'll try to get all the policies together so the website is very accessible. I will be installing TinyMCE (A WYSIWYG editor) in the next day or so, as well as installing a few modules for things like images, files, etc.