Thoughts on My First Code Retreat

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