Some time ago i sat down with couple of developers, and we discussed ways of improving your skills some of the folks that sat in the room were seasoned Developers with some fine experience though they felt that the day to day work doesn't improve their skill level anymore, while the others were graduate developers with hunger to learn and uplift their skills.
then we discussed about options to achieve a common goal between the experience gap in the room how can one task serve them all ?
Option 1
Lets start with some katas said Gabe, they are repetitive can be done in couple of ways. the only issue is that it does not serve well the goal of the more experience developers. and to be honest they are BORING!
we kept discussing and thinking of how we can have a mutual task that
- Is not boring
- Actually takes you out of your comfort zone
- Can be shared and paired.
Option 2
Lets join an open source project. which it is a sensible option though again it might takes time to get into the project, and it is sometimes tedious to push through. couple of people mentioned it is to much commitment. so off we go back to the drawing board.
The Following Night
we returned home and this idea rolled in my mind. people who wants to learn and improve finds it hard to do so with the day to day job. part of them didnt want to commit to an open source Project and still feel that the task they are doing is helping them in some way. and then it came to my mind. to design a task that involve the life cycle of a project, a task that will punish you if you jump straight to coding. something that will involve some code that someone else written. The Task can be found here it is still a work in progress but a good start.
The task above was written in such way that the seasoned developer who wants to practice his Architecture Skills can just do that and provide it to the Junior Developer who wants to practice his design skills.
In that case if the "Architect" of the task screwed up the developer will be "punished" fast enough to get feedback. and push it back.
The Task have enough pit falls to teach you enough.
so if you decide to pick up the task all by yourself you can do it end to end. and feel the heat in the kitchen.
another layer added to this task is that it comes with a service that serves the task and gives you the feeling of how it is to work with other teams even if you do it all by your self. in addition it is full of bugs :)
End of Part I
In the next Chapter i will discuss how people approach the Task and what was the most pain points.
until next time don't forget to star the repo if you like the task. and follow me on Twitter.
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