Last week, we had our first Coding Dojo at SFSharp.org, the San Francisco F# group – and it was great! A few people in the group had mentioned that at that point they were already convinced F# was a great language, and that what they wanted was help getting started writing actual code, so I figured this would be a good format to try out.

What I wanted was something fun, something cool people could realistically achieve under 2 hours. I settled for one of the Kaggle introduction problems, a classic of Machine Learning, where the goal is to automatically recognize hand-written digits. I didn’t think it would be fair to just throw people in the shark tank without any guidance, especially for F# beginners, so I prepared a minimal slide deck to explain the problem and data set, and a “guided script”, with hints and language syntax examples.

And… it worked! The attendees were absolutely awesome. We had people from Kaggle, Rdio, and two people who drove all the way from Sacramento; we had beginners and experienced FSharpers – and everybody managed to get a classifier working, from scratch. Having some beers available definitely helped, too.

My favorite part is this one attendee, a F# beginner, who kept going at it after the meeting was over, and posted an algorithm improvement in the comments section of the Meetup a couple days after. Way to go! And given the positive response, we’ll definitely have more of these.

Also wanted to say a huge thanks to Matt Harrington, first for starting this user group back then, and then for still being an incredible supporter of the F# community in SF, in spite of a crazy work schedule. Thanks, Matt!

Introduction slide deck

“Guided script”

I presented “For Those About to Mock”, an introduction to Mocking for C# developers, at the San Francisco chapter of Bay .NET last week, and promised I would make the material available.

Here it is: you can download the code “For Those About to Mock” here.

Thanks for everyone who made it, it was a great crowd with lots of good questions – I had a great time!

It’s this time of the year again: on Saturday & Sunday October 8 + 9, Silicon Valley CodeCamp is taking place at Foothill College in Los Altos Hill. There are currently over 200 sessions listed, and 2000 people signed up already. I am expecting lots of fun - again.

I’ll be giving 3 talks this year:

• Sat, 11:45 - Beginning TDD for C# Developers.
• Sun, 1:15: For Those About to Mock.
• Sun, 2:45: An excursion in F#

Hope to see you there, and also that I will have some energy left to attend some of the other talks!

More information about my talks here.

Thanks to all of you who attended my sessions on Mocking and on TDD at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2010; I had a great time presenting, in large part because you were awesome and asked great questions!

I uploaded the slides and code for the session on Mocks here. There wasn’t much “written” material for the TDD session, so I didn’t upload it. If someone wants it, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it, too.

Feel free to let me know if there are things I could have done better in the comments below, and don’t forget to fill in your evaluations on the Code Camp website. It’s very helpful for speakers, and… you can win an iPad, courtesy of Dice.com!

On a side note, hats off to Peter Kellner and the whole crew of volunteers. Silicon Valley Code Camp gets bigger every year, and yet, the organization was flawless, and the whole event very fun. Congratulations!

I am very honored that the East Bay chapter of the Bay Area .Net user group will have me as a speaker this upcoming Wednesday. I’ll be talking “For Those About to Mock”, about Mocks and Stubs in .Net, after a presentation of the unit testing features of Visual Studio by Deborah Kurata – an apt opening topic, if you ask me.

You can find more information about this event here; Hope to see you on Wednesday!