Wax On, Wax Off: Coder Dojo

At a high level this talk was ultra helpful. I was already familiar with code katas and had previously worked through a few simpler examples in the past. The concepts of time boxing while purposefully scrapping work after that time limit and freeing yourself from the constraints of business expectation (shipping code), allowing yourself to focus on the quality of your solution, were my biggest take aways. The only criticism I could offer would be that perhaps, for a training talk, the given kata was a bit difficult. The barrier of entry seemed high for those of us at a lower level of understanding. Regardless though, the concepts and purposes exposed are the real gems here. Well done.

Overall I think the class went well, and the concept itself fits well with the tutorial length. My only complaint is that the suggested kata might have been a bit to high-level. I think swapping out the kata would greatly help.

I liked the concept of this workshop. I appreciate that the point was made several times that what we are dong in kata is learning concepts and we must decide what we are trying to learn. I have tried to make this point as well when leading a smaller kata workshop.

The kata we worked on, Conway's Game of Life, seemed a bit daunting for a 30 minute kata exercise. However, the goal was not to complete the kata, but to learn along the way. I liked the lather/rinse/repeat-with-a-twist cycle; though in normal circumstances, I would probably do the next iteration of the kata on a different day rather than 30 minutes later.

A HUGE thanks to the various folks who volunteered their time to act as helpers in this workshop!

Overall, Yitzchok's delivery is calm and well-reasoned.

I will be applying some of these concepts in a future workshop with my local PHP user group.