Programming and martial art: what is common?

Writing code is a craft that requires continuous development, according to EPAM's Coding Dojo initiative. Movement leader Alexander Baglay from Kiev told how dojo practitioners improve the mood of engineers and why the game helps to succeed.

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In Japan, the dojo is a place where training in various martial arts takes place. In a figurative sense, this is a place where we discipline ourselves to become better, share knowledge, help each other and just have a good time. Engineers, being creative guys, decided to take the term “dojo” and apply it to programming. Say, we express ourselves by writing code, and this is also a craft that requires its place to improve skills.

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So, the developers gather in a certain place and begin to carry out “katas” - simple tasks, repeating which, they pump their engineering skills. Coding Dojo can have various forms. One of them is Codenjoy, or coding for the sake of pleasant emotions. Participants create their own bot, which then real-time competes in some simple game - for example, Tetris, Battlecity, Snake, Sudoku, Minesweeper, Moebius and others. The winner is the team or participant whose bot scored the most points.

Project manager Alexander Baglay has been promoting the Codenjoy initiative in EPAM at the global level for about a year :

“I started as an ordinary engineer on a project in another company. Once at a conference I learned about a new tool - Coding Dojo, which until recently was an overseas curiosity. At this event, Johannes Brodwall showed participants one of his implementations. Then, together with Sergey Zelenin, we decided to write something of our own.

So Tetris appeared, and a little later we gave this game our own name - Codenjoy (from Code + Enjoy). The result was an activity of an interesting format that we regularly held, wherever we were invited. Later, the Codenjoy community divided into Sensei, or organizers, adding fuel to the fire; participants - programmers who write code; and contributors - those who began to write their own games. Depending on the results of the game, participants receive feedback - why the leader broke into the leaders, and the rear graze the rear.

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Thus, in the last company, Codenjoy developed as a weekend initiative, until I met with the head of the Engineering Excellence program at EPAM Sergey Sergienko. He drew attention to Codenjoy and a few years later invited me to the company to develop this initiative. In this way, I began to engage in a weekend project, but already as the main work.

Firstly , I collect, analyze all the developments on this topic, and also help to use them in different locations. As a rule, IT professionals are always full of ideas on how to brighten up their workdays with various intellectual meetings.

SecondlyI’m looking for active guys who are ready to catch the idea of ​​EPAM Dojo and make their contribution to its development. For example, we are ready to hold such a meeting in their location, improve the format, offer it on their project, including to customers.

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Thirdly , every day I tell and show EPAMers what Coding Dojo is and how it works, I help with materials and organizing meetings in this format. I am glad that now more and more of them are being held - it can be team building for participants in a production project or training as part of an external conference for Talent Acquisition. We also work with trainers who want to diversify their trainings with the help of game elements.

Coding Dojo is a gamification tool for different professionals. We can work not only with Software engineers, but also with automated testing engineers (for them we have the Coding Automated Testing Dojo program). In addition, we work with non-technical specialists (based on the I Can Code game, we help them get basic ideas about programming). It's nice when after two hours of such a game, under the supervision of a facilitator, an HR specialist says: “Great! It's not as complicated as it seemed. ”

Another form of our activities is the gamification of the production process itself. Suppose a team needs to solve a particular problem. And instead of saying “Do such and such” to the guys, you can introduce leaderboards, achievements, other attributes and offer a game with clear visualization.

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When they say to you: “Here’s a sandbox for you, here’s a spatula, let's go do it!”, Children's excitement for work awakens in you, productivity increases. Even if on the eve you just played Codenjoy with partners, and the code went to the scrap - the mood with which you are charged will feed you on a combat project for a long time to come. Personally, Coding Dojo helps me get that fan, the magic that I received when I just touched programming. I am glad that on any day of the week you can recharge with this drive.

Playing Coding Dojo, the guys take the path of change: they see that their code is not high quality and they need to grow, because someone else beat them 10 or 100 times on points. Or they simply get distracted from the main project activities and find inspiration in the game. It turns out a kind of coding therapy "medicine" for enthusiasm.

Join the Coding Dojo initiative as a volunteer. At https://github.com/codenjoyme you can fork the project and work with it. For questions, please contact Alexander through the contact form on our website .

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