Al Wrote It, You Clean It: A Code Duplication Workshop

Abstract:
When working with AI or LLMs that generate code for us, we often need to review the code and understand what's happening. Sometimes the code becomes hard to read due to large amounts of duplication. Knowing how to recognize opportunities to quickly and safely remove duplication is a useful skill when you're trying to understand what's going on.

In this workshop, held in collaboration with Calgary Software Crafters, we will pair up to work on small practice exercises that help us see duplication in code. Then, we'll quickly and easily refactor to remove it and allow the hidden architecture inherent in the code to emerge.
We will look at exercises in one of five languages (Python, C#, C++, JavaScript, or Java), so bring a laptop with an IDE and get ready to code!

Suggested IDEs: PyCharm, CLion, Visual Studio with ReSharper, WebStorm, IntelliJ, Eclipse, VS Code.

Learning Outcomes:

• Seeing duplication
• Extracting duplication
• Refactoring to create extractable duplication