My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder
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The chapter this week from My Job Went to India tells us to "Practice, Practice, Practice." It's pretty obvious advice - if you practice something, you will get better at it. Assuming that skill has value, you'll be able to market yourself easier.

What's not so obvious is that we are "paid to perform in public - not to practice." Unfortunately, most of us practice at our jobs (which is another reason we started the Code Dojo).

Perhaps because the advice seems so obvious is why when I reread this chapter, I realized I hadn't done 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 point of practice.

Specifically, we might focus on three areas when practicing, which parallel Chad's experience as 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 win an iPod Nano for doing. 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 take you hours can be done in one line of code - it's built right 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 list of an open source application, deciding on a feature to implement or bug to fix, and then going through the source to find out where it needs to go. Impose time constraints on yourself, and rotate through many different projects (and languages), and you'll get faster at "sight 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 structure 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 file. No body 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 like a magical power when wielded at the right time.
Of the three, I really like his ideas on practicing improvisation: "Pick a simple program, and try 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 golfing. I'm sure you can think of others (and I plan 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 regularly scheduled practice, like Scott Hanselman does in his series, The Weekly Source Code.

Anyone want to lend some moral support and start practicing too? We could be like 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.

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