The Starter League's Ruby Dojo exists to prepare people with a good Ruby foundation to get "over the hump" and into professional software development. These 8 weeks will not be focused on Rails, nor on creating a web application. Instead, these 8 weeks will be focused on establishing good habits and a deeper understanding of how to solve more fundamental problems. We will be honing our skills together, and ultimately, you will learn how to think like a programmer.
Class will be held from 8am to noon, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, starting on September 25th. The last day together will be November 15th, and that Thursday evening we will have a Dojo Day event. Our 12 hours per week together will be split into structured blocks of time, though within those blocks of time, you will have the autonomy to adapt your time to your needs.
Here's the plan:
Tuesday
70 minutes of Code Kata
120 minutes of Topical
50 minutes of Freestyle
Wednesday
50 minutes of Group Exercise & Retrospective
120 minutes of Freestyle
70 minutes of Research
Thursday
70 minutes of Code Kata
120 minutes of Open Source
50 minutes of Sparring!
Now let me decode these different terms:
- Code Kata: An exercise in programming which helps you hone your skills through practice and repetition. The word "dojo" is typically used to describe a martial arts training center. In martial arts, "kata" are used to internalize a choreographed sequence of movements. We will work through and solve a set of kata. This is where problem-solving gets out of your head and gets into your hands.
- Topical: consists of Lecture, Live coding, and Lab work. I will use this time to introduce you to important topics such as recursion, SOLID principles, Unix philosophy, and testing.
- Freestyle: This is your time to explore with experienced Rubyists close at hand. The principles to guide this time are Practice, Project-work, and Pair Programming.
- Group Exercise: An often-neglected habit in software development is engaging the body and mind simultaneously. We will use some simple physical exercises to get our blood flowing. Nothing too intense.
- Retrospective: We will adapt this structure along with how we use our time inside the structure based on a weekly retrospective.
- Research: You will be preparing for a 4-minute presentation at Dojo Day. The 4 minutes will be spent explaining a programming concept, technique, or principle that you learned and focused on during your Dojo experience. See below for more information on Dojo Day.
- Open Source: One of the fundamentals of Ruby development is Open Source. We will dive deeper into gem development, share our favorite gems with each other, learn how to effectively extract code into gems, and most importantly, actually contribute to the community.
- Sparring: We'll end every week together with some fun collaborative and competitive programming games, like Randori, Code Golf, and Ping-Pong Programming.
The Dojo experience will culminate in our Dojo Day on Thursday, November 15th. The core of Dojo Day will be a series of 4-minute lightning talks. As you're preparing for your talk, your target audience should be our Web Development students. These students will attend the Dojo Day in order to get a glimpse of what's ahead for them. We also anticipate experienced practitioners and potential employers will be there as well. I hope you're getting the idea. The underlying theme of the Dojo is practice, practice, practice as we prepare you for your future in professional software development.
Enjoy the journey!
