SharePoint Katas

A SharePoint Kata? What’s that? Well, it all goes back to Coding Katas, of course? Still not clear? Ok, let’s go back to the real beginnings. In many forms of martial arts, a Kata is a series of exercises that is practiced over and over regularly in order to hone and improve one’s skills. Sounds like a good idea, no? So much so that Dave Thomas coined the term Code Kata as a practice of doing something similar to improve one’s coding skills. He’s even got a whole site dedicated to Katas and there are a few other great ones, like 1 or 2 from “Uncle” Bob Martin.

So, now we’re back up the stack to SharePoint Katas. The goal of this site is to propose and discuss Katas related to SharePoint. However, I don’t want us to just limit them to development-related Katas, because I think that administrators and even users can benefit from doing some regular activities. Here are some possible benefits:

1. Improving, refining and honing existing skills, so we get better at what we do already
2. Repeating Katas over time, so we don’t forget something we did and knew in the past
3. Learning new SharePoint skills as we get to try a small (e.g. 30 minute) task focused on something we haven’t done before.

Some of the best Katas are those done in pairs! The goal of this site is to help us improve, share, discuss and learn together, so get involved by suggesting your own Katas, commenting on the ones here already, and helping to build some real SharePoint Ninjas!

For more Coding Katas, here’s another great site: http://codingkata.org/. To find out more about some of the techniques used, like Unit Testing and TDD, especially with SharePoint, check out the podcast interview with Roy Osherove, who has some great some great Katas of his own.

The latest fad in Katas is the video version – check out www.katacasts.com for more!