NJ Geeks - New Jersey's IT Community

Not too long ago, I formed the .NET Meetup so I could meet other .NET local developers, learn a few tricks, and work on improving my .NET skills.  We've been meeting weekly, and until recently had a very loose agenda where we were supposed to form ad hoc groups and work on projects.  Unfortunately, that didn't work too well insofar as even self-organizing teams need structure.  That led me to conceive of something I call Pair-Programming Shu-Ha-Ri, based on some of the concepts of pair-programming and Martin Fowler's write-up on Shu-Ha-Ri.

Tonight we put the idea into practice, and I think it went pretty well despite the lack of Masters/Guides.  The main goal for the evening was to be productive and pass down knowledge and technique, and from the feedback I got, I think that was accomplished.  We broke up into two teams where there were two students/laptop and a guide for the team.  Each team brain stormed an idea, and the master guided the team to breaking down the idea into clear defined goals.  Each team then created a mock-up and some of the teams got started on writing unit tests using NUnit.

From talking to the novices, they seemed to appreciate how the session focuses on the Master showing the Student how to be productive using the Master's methods.  Concepts are explained when necessary, but only enough to complete the task.  There are better ways to learn concepts, these sessions are all about learning technique.  A number of the Students never used NUnit or had done test-driven development before, and a few mentioned they will be doing more test-driven development with NUnit in the future.

I'm looking forward to the next session, but I would like to see more Masters/Guides come out so the teams are more of a 1-on-1 experience.