gnublade

The 5th London Python Dojo

After several mishaps trying to get to the last few dojo’s having only made the very first I arrived cold but safe to Fry-IT‘s office and in time for beer and pizza.  Showed off the N900 to anyone who would listen (I really do love that phone can you tell?).

People were invited to add ideas to a whiteboard but I couldn’t think of anything specific myself.  I did think it would have been good to somehow use the recently announced London Datastore but the website’s pagination didn’t appear to be working to view the full list of data packages available. We voted on the ideas, the winner being a text based adventure game that we plan to use as a basis for future dojo’s.  I was a bit sceptical at first but what a great idea it turned out to be!

Dave Kirby then gave a talk on CRC cards prior to the dojo proper.  I like the idea of having a small lightening talk before the dojo especially if it’s to suggest something to be taken and attempted in the dojo itself.  Maybe we could have been encouraged more to use the technique ourselves especially if we had been split into groups with at least one member being one of those that had admitted using them previously.

Then we were split into 5 teams, our team having five members. Something I didn’t think about at the time but should have been our first task was naming our team, so for posterity I’ll name us The Octopodes.

We sat down at first and started hashing a few ideas such as using the Cmd module from the python standard library as the main game engine.  We made a half hearted attempt to use the CRC cards but we only came up with one class which was Room. We split into a two man creative team and a 3 man dev team with the plan of changing places at regular intervals.  We didn’t quite manage this as we lost track of time but everybody did manage to be on both the dev and creative teams even if they didn’t get to drive in both.

After an hour, time was called and we finished up ready to watch the other teams present.  In fact we added a few bits of polish as the other teams were presenting (shh don’t tell anyone).  Our game plot was a roughtly Jules Verne-esque sea voyage complete with giant octopus allowing you to ‘look’ and ‘go’ as Cmd commands with the default action being to go.  The game ended with the command ‘win’ which at some point someone had tacked on a space invaders pygame. Completely random, didn’t have a clue about it but got the biggest laugh of the night when we presented.

Our code:

http://github.com/ntoll/code-dojo/tree/master/adventure/week1/team2/

Notable points of the various solutions:

• Two of the other teams also used the Cmd module as their game engine
• One used a custom file format to describe their game environment whereas we just used a standard Python dict
• One team (or were there more) practised TDD (we decided not to, due to time constraints)
• One team was unable to present much due problems caused by an early design decision
• Only one include a space invaders game (and giant octopus)

After the presentations we discussed the format for the next dojo which we decided to have as a traditional randori dojo to integrate all of the solutions into a common base to use in the next dojo or if we have time later that same evening.  Hopefully we’ll integrate as one big group and then use the many small teams method for the next step which will be adding objects and interactions as I really enjoyed the slight competitive angle.  Smaller teams definitely give you more opportunity of a voice for those of us who don’t quite have the presence of Bruce.

I was a little gutted not to win the Google App Engine O’Reilly book as it would have come in handy for my current project, a post on that will be forthcoming once I’ve got it up and working.

We then moved on to the Dogget for an ale or two where Bruce cajoled me into announcing the next London #pyssup which will be on Wednesday 20th January at the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street.

Tags: dojo, geek, london, Python

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Python, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.