Codefol.io

Coding exercises seem like a great idea if you want to learn coding. If you want to learn a practical skill then you should practice, right?

And yet coders don’t do a lot of them. Some, but not a lot. And the longer you’ve been a coder, the fewer of them you seem to do. Ask your favourite long-term veteran coder. A few of them will act guilty that they don’t, but almost none of them actually do coding exercises.

Why don’t we?

I could rail about how silly that is. But I won’t. If nearly everybody doesn’t do something, it’s usually because it’s not as good an idea as it seems. They used to tell us to all use flowcharts for designing program logic. We didn’t. We were 100% right on that one.

We’re basically right about coding exercises, too. But there’s a better alternative that a few people do, especially long-time coders. That’s what you should actually be doing. It’s more fun, too.

But before we get to what you maybe should be doing, let’s talk about why you’re right about most coding exercises.

technique

Last time we talked about why I’m building course software in Rails from scratch, and built out a basic skeleton of database tables and a first trivial view.

Today, let’s add a theme, build out the view a little more and generally make it look better. I think “Let’s Build” series look better with...

ruby rails letsbuild rubymadscience

In March, I wrote about the UK’s Global Talent Visa and how, as a coder, it probably meant you could get long-term residence in the UK even working for yourself.

Recently Geoffrey Robichaux asked me great questions about it. He even agreed I could post them here! I’ll share his questions and my answers...

entrepreneur career

(Don’t care about explanations? Scroll down for screenshots and code.)

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a bunch of blog posts, YouTube videos, conference talks and so on, teaching the things I teach — Ruby and Rails programming, building web frameworks, raw coding technique and more.

I want to put...

ruby rails letsbuild rubymadscience

(YouTube link)

I’ve been asking a lot of coders about how they got where they got. I have a personal interest in that long slump in the ‘senior engineer’ section of our career, but there are all sorts of fascinating stories along the way.

Andy Neely is on my...

career video

I started working for myself at the beginning of February, after taking a month off. For close to eight years I sold my book as essentially a hobby business. It made around $40,000 over those years, which certainly isn’t terrible. It’s been doing slightly better since I started actually putting time...

business

I have an exercise you can do to tell if your Big Rewrite software project will work out. It’s a simple one, but a good one. But first, a story.

Back in 2013 I worked for a company called OnLive. They brought me on as part of a project called “Valhalla” to rewrite a big chunk of their existing system...

technique

You know the Golden Child Engineer, the favourite of the Director of Engineering? He’s that guy (and it’s basically always a guy) who’s the company Teacher’s Pet? The software developer who gets promotion after promotion?

You’re not that guy. With one fun exception, I haven’t been either. And I’ve...

technique career rebuildingrails

Her nose wrinkled. “I really hate job hunting.” He looked down, but her chicken curry seemed fine.

“How come?”

“The interviewer is trying to seem smarter than you. The questions are stupid and you’ve already heard them or you haven’t. It’s not like those are really things you do on the job.”

“Huh...

career video

A reader wrote me an email recently. That’s always a good feeling! He had a question about Mastering Software Technique and general code learning that I’ll bet a lot of you share: it’s easy to go off the rails doing useful things rather than what I recommend. But why? Is it a problem? How can it be...

technique