A year ago I embarked on a journey into learning how to program. I spent 550 hours of hard work across 7 months towards a goal of being proficient in writing code. The word proficient is very subjective and as I think if I am or not, I think of what areas I need practice in.
I have been playing my entire life, began at the age of 9, and as a musician I understand the importance of practice and trying different things. As many children I group listening to fair bit amount of music but never really got into classic rock and crazy guitar solos until I got into college. It was never an area of music I appreciated until college, but once I discovered that genre, I was able to increase my musical ability exponentially.
I have volunteered to facilitate the Global Day of Code, because just as in music I understand the need for practice to strengthen skills. The Global Day of Code is meant for developer who does not have time to try new things or appreciate other languages because of time constraints and deadlines. Due to these constraints we generally stick to the techniques that we have proven and avoid the risk of trying something new.
If you are looking to get into a new programming language or just strengthening your programming skills, the Global Day of Code is for you.
The structure of the day is broken up into 40 min pairing sessions with different developers throughout the day. There is a very good chance you will pair with a developer who has a different idea of how to write code and solve the problem, which open up the door for you to learn.
The problem laid out for the pairs is Conway's Game of Life and is a fairly straight forward but very unlikely to be completed in 40minutes, during each pairing session a new constraint is provided to challenge the pairs, For example one session I was given the constraint where I person writes test and the others write the code to pass the test, without talking. This was rather difficult since I had never tested in Ruby prior and had the luxury of also pairing with someone using VIM, which I also had no experience with.
The entirety of experience at the code retreat was only 1 month into my journey towards learning code and I still took away a ton of information. It actually began my attempt into testing in Ruby and is the main reason why learned it early in my programming journey.
If you are interested in joining a Code Retreat near I highly recommend and if you are in the Orlando area, I highly recommend joining me on November 15th.
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