Raising the bar

[Ryan Hagan]

I'm a software developer and manager for a company with a good sized
R&D staff. I've got 25 intelligent and passionate, but very young,
software developers in my department. Luckily, almost every single
one of them is constantly working on becoming better developers. I
try to facilitate this process by holding bi-weekly development
exercises.

Every other Friday afternoon, I get a group of developers together for
3 or 4 hours and we work on introducing better software engineering
techniques. Some examples of previous sessions are:

SOLID development practices (one exercise for each principal in the
acronym)
Writing code with unit testing in mind
Intro to TDD
MySQL (discussion of engines, table design, indexing strategies,
complex queries)
Continuous Integration techniques
Various design patterns

The format for these exercises changes. Sometimes it's just a
discussion, sometimes we write code on the whiteboard and talk about
why it's particularly bad (or good), and sometimes we pair up and
write code.

So far, we've had a lot of fun doing these, but I'm always looking for
new topics and new formats. Has anyone else participated in these
kinds of exercises that they'd care to share? One that I particularly
enjoyed was at a local .Net Users Group where someone in the group had
programmed a Blackjack game with 10 bugs in it and challenged us to
find all the bugs using only unit tests. Any other ideas?