{"id":799,"date":"2017-01-07T21:19:21","date_gmt":"2017-01-08T05:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/?p=799"},"modified":"2017-01-07T21:19:21","modified_gmt":"2017-01-08T05:19:21","slug":"silly-code-exercisms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/07\/silly-code-exercisms\/","title":{"rendered":"Silly code exercisms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in August I started working on the Ruby track<\/a> on Exercism.io<\/a>. I’ve had mixed success with\u00c2\u00a0structured code learning – I did the JS track on Codecademy two years ago, which worked fairly well, but I lose interest in “build a toy application” projects almost instantly. When I was working in Support at New Relic, I realized it’s because my interest in code isn’t as a craft or profession – my profession is solving problems<\/a>, and code (like writing) is a tool I use to do that.<\/p>\n

Codecademy and Exercism work for me because they set up well-defined small problems for me to solve with code. I’m not good enough at programming (yet) to solve a really big problem with code without guidance on how to approach it, so small problems work well.<\/p>\n

The Exercism exercises are mostly somewhat silly artificial constructs, but I do think they’ve benefited my ability to mentally model problems, my familiarity with basic Ruby constructs, and my code style. At this point in the track (18 problems complete) I don’t always come up with a super awesome way to do something the first time, but I can often write code in such a way that my first attempt to create the algorithm works for most cases, and I’m also usually able to find the part of my code I want to tidy up later and understand why I’m having trouble with it.<\/p>\n

Less than two weeks after I’d started, it was already helping me:<\/p>\n

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Interesting fact: @exercism_io<\/a> has already contributed to my ability to do my job!<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u201d Alexis Grant (@lyspeth) August 30, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n