I was catching up on podcasts the other day and finally got around to listening to DNR show #410 with Robert (Uncle Bob) Martin. He's a big Agile guy and I'm still not sure how I feel about Agile (as distinct from "agile") programming, although there are certainly a lot of good things to learn from both the Agile community in general and specifically from people who have more years in the industry than I have in life. Bob Martin talked about both programmer/musicians and programmer/martial artists and made mention of the idea of 'software katas', which appeals to me more and more as I continue to think about it. More than I even think he was aware of it, there's a teaching method here that works very well; the student is given a set of things to do with rules that seem arbitrary. The fact is that the rules are arbitrary in a lot of cases and that the movements of the kata are never repeated precisely in application, but what they teach is universal and so there are bits and pieces that will be used in a variety of circumstances. The kata can be taught without teaching the application (the whole 'wax on, wax off' thing) and even here it is valuable because it teaches muscle memory and good general practice that can be remembered when a specific application is called for. And katas are to be repeated; that is their purpose. The last is something I well know; it is one thing to be able to successfully replicate the movements and something different to be able to use the form as a training tool.
So here I am. Training. I don't know any formal coding katas myself, but I am writing some code myself and I've wanted to make a formal commitment for a while now to learn something every day and write about it. Let's call it every weekday for a month to be realistic (though I'll claim bonus points for weekends) and including the code in the post is a must. I even have one for today, though it's something I've been saving for a while. The purpose of this is as a reminder for me, though maybe someone else will stumble across it and find it useful. I hope so.
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