Using Exercism.io to Sharpen Coding Skills

Yesterday, I gave a short "lightening talk" at the TN Gov Nerds User Group meeting about my experience using the Exercism.io website to sharpen my coding skills. The Exercism.io was created by a Computer Software Instructor Katrina Owen to help give her students an opportunity to write code to solve specific problems and receive feedback or "nitpicks" from more experienced developers. Here is a podcast with Katrina Owen discussing Exercism.io: http://thechangelog.com/108/ I started using Exercism.io about four months ago when Andy Collins and Brian Cox suggested it to me as a good way to gain some programming experience and feedback. And now I am really glad that I did. I have made it about half way through the C# track of exercisms. Each exercism consist of a Readme file and a set of Unit Tests with all but the first one disabled either through code or being commented out. A good thing about this approach is that it introduces "newbies" like myself to Test Driven Development -TDD approach to software development. It has not always been easy. There have been some frustrating exercisms that I had to just stop working on for a while and come back to later and try a different approach. My goal is to attempt to write as few lines of code as I can that is hopefully readable and logical to anyone else reading it. There is also a quite of bit effort involved in setting up the exercises at the beginning. The help section on Exercism.io has gotten better, but I think there is room for improvement. Despite that, I really recommend Exercism.io to anyone seriously interested in improving their coding skills and gaining a level of experience to try it out. I have shared each of my exercisms on twitter as I completed them here: https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=joseph_tdot%20csharp%20just&src=typd Thanks for Reading My Blog! -Joseph https://twitter.com/Joseph_TDOT