On Friday, November 13, Faye Thompson and I once again co-facilitated Two Midwesterners Politely Invite You To Explore Coding at Agile Arizona (rebranded “Agile Arisofa” for our remote-only era). The abstract:
Wonder what it’s like to do what programmers do? Maybe people have tried to explain it, but didn’t put it in terms that computed for you. Or maybe you would like to become more technical, but the mere thought of trying to code has felt intimidating. Today is a new day!
Faye’s a non-programmer from Ohio, Amitai’s a sometimes-programmer from Illinois, and with your help, we’ll solve a problem by thinking and coding together. If you want to, you can take a brief turn at the keyboard; if not, no biggie. When we’re done, we think you’ll have a new kind of feeling about code and coding. You might even want to pursue it further.
Fitting this into 60 minutes was a bit squeezy, so we made two tradeoffs:
- Instead of finishing the test-driven story, get just enough examples to show the process
- Instead of giving navigators the full navigating experience, do lots of navigating myself to get us somewhere interesting enough by the end
This seems to have worked out, by our own lights and by those of our participants, several of whom stuck around after the bell to ask Faye more questions about TDD and mobbing. I’d have liked to be available afterward too, but a kid needed my help navigating bedtime.