And I mean full, I don’t have any hard data to support my statement but my one month experience here and comparison with my home city (Poznan) that is same size as Oslo. And even if % of people who are typing lines of code here is not really higher at least they are way more active and passionate of what they do.

.NET Users, Windows Phone Developer Community, The Oslo Lean Meetup, Extreme Programming Group, Java Developers, heck! - there is even a Delphi users group. No to mention that local software houses, consulting firms, etc. are really interested in growth of their employees and they actively invite speakers outside of Norway.

I have visited Test-Driven Development with JavaScript and node.js organized in an office of one of Norway’s software houses (60 people attended, and right after there was an XP meeting with more then 100 registered – quite impressive). First speaker was Norwegian, but fortunately after a short survey whether there are or not non Norwegian people at the public they decided to have this talk in English (it turned out that only for me – thank you :-)!). BTW Norway is truly amazing country where everyone, and I mean everyone can speak English (yes, even 80 years old people and drug addicts). I met some really nice people there, very passionate about what they do.

This week however I experienced something completely new. I attended a meeting that was a form of Coding Dojo. According to Coding Dojo website it is:

.. a meeting where a bunch of coders get together to work on a programming challenge. They are there have fun and to engage in DeliberatePractice in order to improve their skills.

Host of this meeting was Jon Jagger, a truly passionate guy who created http://www.cyber-dojo.com/. As he states on this webiste:

I built CyberDojo so you can practice and learn about:

• coding and test driven development
• team dynamics and collaboration

Now please try to imagine, around 8 notebooks, pair programming, 5 minutes of time between group change, C#, C, Java, Python, Ruby and one Roman Numbers problem :-) It might seem like a chaos at the beginning, and yes, it was hard to get to the working solution, but for me lesson of importance of red, green development, leaving your code in a state that work can be continued right after you left, getting closer to the solution in a small steps was really valuable.

If you can ever have chance to experience such a thing, I do strongly encourage you to do this, you are going to learn a lot about your team working skills.