Tuesday at OOPSLA'08

Tuesday I managed to seen a bit less things from the conference since I had to work as part of my student volunteer program for most of the day. I managed to see the opening keynote and at the end of the day, have a session of traditional Coding Dojo.

The opening keynote was from an archeologist named Mark Lehner who dedicated over 30 years of his life to the history of Egypt. He had a long talk about the way the pyramids are viewed and his search for the city that existed to support the pyramids constructions. Aside from several very interesting information about archeology and the way archeologists work, his talk showed how modular the city that built the pyramids was. Amazingly, the houses of the workers were all pretty much the same several times replicated as instances of a model. He also showed that the hierarquical structure among the builders was the same as in every social organization where roles were different acording to the structure where you were, or simply polymorphic.

All this is interesting and shows the ideas we have nowadays are not even close to be new and have been used over and over. Reassuring but no big deal to me. What amazed me was that those things only happend in the city that built the pyramids and the people in it. The pyramids themselves not modular or polymorphic at all. They are carefully hand crafted to and not slightly modular. I don't know yet what to take away from this information but it sure sounds like something we should think about.

During the day I did a few volunteers task. I ended my day by attending to the Coding Dojo session. First of all, I wish people with the Javascript library called 'dojo' would rename their project to something more appropriate. According to their own website, 'dojo' is just a name that won't get them sued. Coding Dojos actually do have a reason to be called as such and I had a few people coming over thinking we were going to talk about the library which is somehow anoying. Anyway, we had a small group (4 people including me and Mariana) and we attacked the Minesweeper problem in Java. We managed to code a solution but we were not really very pleased with it at the end. Mostly because we only had two tests (although we had a 100% coverage) and we took some very big steps during the solution. This is a very common outcome for a first session of a Coding Dojo. Feeling which tests will result in a major step is something that does not have (yet?) a Shu or Ha description and is usually learned with practice and time.

That's about it for Tuesdays. I'll post a bit about the following days later on this week.
Enjoy yourselves.