Thoughts on My First Code Retreat
Published on 22 Oct 2016
by Alexander Garber
When I turned up at the annual Melbourne Code retreat, I was nervous and reticent.
I am not a professional programmer – yet – and I had no illusions of keeping pace with people who do this for a living.
Nevertheless, I stuck it out and learned an awful lot. The organisers Tomasz and Ilya did a fine job of running the event, and I appreciate their encouragement.
Conclusions and Ideas:
- Do puzzle programming.
- Make code kata a regular practice.
- Focus on one language, either Python or Ruby and learn programming concepts thoroughly.
- Attend programming meet-ups, preferably for Python or Ruby, and seek out a mentor.
- Attend a DevOps meet-up, at least once.
- Make code dojos and retreats a priority.
- Learn TDD. (Test-driven development)
- Familiarise myself with a testing framework.
- Using a text editor and the terminal is all well and good when starting out, but using a properly kitted out IDE is essential.
I will return to this post and add more.
UPDATE:
Some useful comments:
- Pick one IDE and get settled.
- Choose one that supports multiple languages: python, ruby, etc.
- Eventually you’ll want to learn emacs or vim, but these can wait.
- Code Katas
- Programming Praxis