Category Archives: Belgian Play! Framework User Group

Thoughts on the Belgian Play! Framework User Group dojo

Posted by on October 6, 2012 No comments

The 3rd of October saw the Belgian Play! Framework User Group hold its first coding dojo and overall, it was a success. It’s the first time I’ve been involved in the organisation of anything like this, although the vast majority of the preparation was done by Ben Verbeken.

We had 17 people at the dojo, plus a DBA who stopped by for an hour because he’s interested in how developers and DBAs can work more efficiently together. We had an application specification from an idea by Andy Petrella, along with a reference implementation coded by Ben, Andy and me. We had a meeting room and refreshments provided by Cegeka. In short, we had everything we needed to have a dojo.

Ben has already covered the application in his post on the dojo, so in the spirit of DRY and general laziness I’ll kindly allow you to read about it on his site. Here, I want to cover the bits we got right, the bits we got wrong and how we can correct or improve in the future.

The good

  • The first thing we got right was to actually organise the dojo in the first place. Everything else, good or bad, stems from this.
  • In place of having two people at the front of the room, with a constant rotation of the group’s members, a wireless keyboard was used and passed to the left at the end of each 10 minute time block. This saved time, and meant that the group wasn’t split up into the watching and the watched.
  • Purely by accident, one of the most experienced members of the group (Andy) was sitting pretty much in the middle, and was the first to code after the 10 minute break. The people who coded in the first half of the dojo got an application up and running, and then Andy kicked it up a notch by adding the Twitter4J dependency and coded up to the point of actually posting to Twitter. The effect of seeing the app interact with an external system with just a few minutes’ coding sparked quite a bit of interest and discussion.
  • On the subject of Twitter, we set up a QuickQuizzz application in Twitter ready for use in the dojo. Doing this during the dojo would have been pointless, because it didn’t directly relate to Play! in any way.
  • We ended up with a working application that (pretty much) met the spec! You can find the code on github.

The bad

  • No wifi! Due to a miscommunication, we didn’t get the password for the wifi network and instead had to turn a laptop on the wired network into a wireless access point. The resulting connection was very slow!
  • No choice of IDE! We had IntelliJ set up as the IDE, but it seems that a lot of people preferred Eclipse.
  • The keyboard moved in a linear fashion, always passing to the left. This meant you knew exactly when it was your turn, but also you knew exactly when it was *no longer* your turn. This ties in with the next point, which is…
  • Each person coded only once.
  • The idea for the app was mentioned at the beginning of the dojo, but not written down in a visible place. As a result, we had to clarify the idea throughout the evening.

Improvements for the next dojo

  • Full-speed network access is a must. At least one person didn’t have Play installed at the start of the dojo, and found it impossible to download due to the poor wireless bandwidth.
  • A choice of IDEs – IntelliJ, Eclipse and Netbeans – will be offered, along with a few text editors for people that don’t like or use IDEs.
  • The next person to code should be determined by something other than seating order – maybe numbered cards picked at random, or an app that chooses a name.
  • Because the overhead on switching between coders is reduced by using a wireless keyboard instead of having people physically move, each person should be able to code for e.g. 5 minute time blocks at multiple times during the evening. This would allow everyone to code before the break, at which point the random ordering can start again.
  • The spec should be written up as a very simple bullet list. A second list, with optional functionality, could be introduced if the app has been finished and there is still time left.

And next…?

The rest of the year looks to be pretty busy, with Devoxx coming up in November, plus day jobs, everyone seems to be doing the Coursera Scala course, etc, and then it’s the holiday season again. I think we’ll hold another event early in 2013 – not necessarily a dojo this time, because we have some other ideas to keep it interesting. In the meantime, Play BE will be having another meet-up in Brussels one evening – bring your friends, bring your laptop, bring your ideas and join us there! Details will be announced on http://play-be.org soon.

PlayBe Dojo – all seats booked, and ready to go

Posted by on September 27, 2012 No comments

With less than a week to go until the Belgian Play! Framework User Group holds its first coding dojo, all 20 places have now been taken.  I was half-way through a blog post to promote it when person #20 signed up, so instead I’m going to flip this over and quickly look at how having an active event can really drive up interest in your user group.

The far more organised co-founder of the usre group, Ben Verbeken, has written about the upcoming dojo here - http://ostia.be/blog/2012/09/18/playbe-first-dojo/

Here’s a chart showing sign-up activity for the group since we started it a few months ago.  We’ve had a couple of meet-ups in the meantime, and have all come into contact with like-minded others.  So far, so good – but notice the lull in sign-up activity in the middle of the chart.

In the first few days, about 18 people joined – and I think a couple of those were people who join any meetup in their area.  Since we announced the dojo, the group has pretty much doubled in size.  The lesson I’m taking from this?  Developers want to develop - having a drink and a chat is all well and good, and our past meet-ups have been good evenings, but it’s not quite the same as sitting down together and creating something new in a couple of hours.

I think that, in future, coding will be a fixture of the meet-ups.  There’s no better way to discuss development than to actually bang some code out there and then.  Using Play, you already have a head start on creating an app in a few minutes which can then be evolved by the others around you.  So, the dojo will (hopefully) be a great night with a structured plan but there’s no reason why every meet-up shouldn’t be the equivalent of several concurrent dojos.

If you would like to join the Belgian Play! Framework User Group, head over to http://play-be.org – it’s free, and there’s a lot of fun ahead of us.

The Play! Framework Belgian User Group

Posted by on May 6, 2012 No comments

When I attended the BeJUG session on the Play! Framework a few weeks ago, I was glad (but not especially surprised) to see how popular the session was. It’s been a busy few weeks since then, but in the meantime I’ve been thinking it’s time for a Belgian User Group for Play!.

I’ve already created a Google Group for it at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/play-be and sent out invitations to people that have expressed an interest. Initially, I plan to start it small and get a meet-up organised. Belgium is small enough that (in theory) no-one should have to travel too far.*

This is the first time I’ve ever tried something like this, so I’ll be asking various other user group founders for tips and hints to make the process as painless and smooth as possible. I’ll be blogging on the development of the group as more things happen, and will include any and all good advice I receive for anyone else who’s thinking of doing this.

Against some of the perceived issues that have arisen between versions 1 and 2, an explicit goal of this user group is to include Play 1, Play 2, Java and Scala – the key is Play, and not a subset of it.

* Of course, in Belgium, distance is measured in traffic density and not kilometers