katjam / resources

Code reading club

This is an experiment inspired by research and teaching excercises designed by Felienne Hermans. At its core is the idea that the paradigm we use to teach programming is flawed. One of the most obvious ommissions is the ability to read code, both phoneticlly and analytically. We aren't suitably equiping ourselves with these building blocks.

The Club

You can run your club in whatever way you want, but we recommend to meet for 1 hour every other week. You might want to agree as a group to read the code snippet beforehand, but you can also do this wihtin the hour.

The Participants

Participants should have had some exposure to code, but your group might include programming adjacent people like testers or scrum masters, we have seen examples where those people also got values out of the club. We have seen it work for groups diverse in other ways too (in terms of cognitive, formal training, experience, skills, style etc).

The Code

We have seen different types of clubs, you might be interested in code form your own code base, maybe in one language, or select open source code in a variety of languages. In our experience, it does not matter all that much what code you pick. The key benefit is an increased ability to understand code when reading and a more sympathetic style of writing code to be read by others, which we think you get more form the process than form the code. Some people though join a club to also learn a new language as a byproduct, when you have a few of those in your group, you might want to sitck to one language.

The Starting Package

This repo contains exercises to use, as well as a Starting Package for the first three clubs, including:

• Code yo use
• A meeting agenga to use
• Exercises to use
• A meeting to a retrospective after the clubs