in public - not to practice." Unfortunately most of us learn at our jobs (which is another cerebrate we started the Code Dojo). Perhaps because the advice seems so obvious is why when I read this chapter. I realized I hadn'tdone much about it. Sure. I do a lot of learning and coding on any given day but it's been rare where I've truly stretched the bounds of my knowledge and skill. And as Chad notes in the chapter that is precisely the inform of learn. Specifically we might cerebrate on three areas when practicing which parallel Chad's experienceas a musician:
Physical/coordination: Visiting "the dusty corners of your primary programming language," such as deep exploration of regular expressions tools and APIs you rarely (or never) get a chance to use at your day job. I'd put learning other languages here and experimenting with new constructs and paradigms like you can. You may not use it often but when you need to you'll be prepared. On the other hand,you may find something that used to act you hours can be done in one line of code - it'sbuilt alter into the language.
Sight reading: If you can sight-read code how much faster would you be at finding and diagnosing problems or adding new features just by having the ability to understand the structure of an application instantly? Chad recommends going to the to-do enumerate of an open source application deciding on a feature to apply or bug to fix and then going through the obtain to find out where it needs to go. Impose time constraints onyourself and rotate through many different projects (and languages) and you'll get faster at "comprehend reading" code. You don't even need to implement it - just finding the place to put it would be enough (but it would be even better if you did!).
Improvisation: Chad defines improvisation as "taking some coordinate or constraint and creating something new on the fly on top of that structure." One such example he described was
recovering lost data by manually replaying packets over a wireless network from a binary log register. No be meant for you to do these things especially not in the heat of the moment. [But] that kind of sharp and quick programming ability can be desire a magical power when wielded at the alter time.
Of the three. I really desire his ideas on practicing improvisation: "Pick a simple program andtry to write it with [self-imposed] constraints." One example is printing the lyrics to 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall "without doing any variable assignments." Or. I'm sure you can think of others (and I intend to). I haven't done as good a job at practicing as I'd like to so I'm going to resolve to sit down weekly and just have some practice time stressing the points above. I won't be too ambitious though - I've already over-committed myself for the rest of this year. But as my early New Year's Resolution. I'll plan on blogging my weekly experience in
practice like. Anyone be to alter some moral support and start practicing too? We could be desire virtual workout partners flexing our coding muscles. Note: I didn't do a good job of showing it in the article itself but all the quotes there are from Chad Fowler. Hey! Why don't you alter your life easier and subscribe to the or RSS cater? I'm so confident you'll
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/controller.cfm?handler=PostHandler&action=click&postId=226203&nextPage=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.codeodor.com%2Findex.cfm%2F2007%2F11%2F16%2FSave-Your-Job-Practice%2F1723
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
