Obviously I did not work during my week off. However if you are a passionate developer you might not want to erase coding and learning from your week.
So what did I do? I planned to move on with my reading: Percival’s TDD with Python. I didn’t really manage to. After we landed in Malaga, I had some ear problems and knelt on my Kindle why getting my backpack from the head compartment. I did not hear it and I felt to late… You cannot “break” a paperbook, but you can definitely break the screen of a Kindle… It served me well during all these 4-5 years. Now, I’m using my wife’s.
I did Clash of Code on CodinGame almost every day. Not too much as usually I was qutie exhausted in the evenings. I like this kind of rapid games because you don’t need more than 15 minutes to practice a bit.
For those who don’t know it, there are three kinds of games:
- Shortest mode You have to pass the tests with the least amount of codes mesured in characters. First I found it frustrating. I am obsessed with clean and readable code and the solutions of these challanges are not so clean to say the least. On the other hand you can discover new ways of coding, compact forms what you probably wouldn’t use otherwise. It can be really enlighting when people share their solutions.
- Fastest mode No clean code either. You have to code under stress. As fast as you can, as simple as that. You only have to pass the tests.
- Reverse mode Similar to fastest mode in terms of you have to be the fastest. But unlike in the fastest mode, here you don’t know the specifications. What you are given are some test results and their inputs. Based on them you have to figure out what the code should do.
It is a bit addictive, but so far I managed to keep the number of played games a day quite small.
Besides I was playing a bit with Python doing some TDD, experimenting with urllib3 and with refactoring techniques in order to dry up some code having a lot of duplication.
The vacation was amazing and I managed to spend some time on my hobby too, on coding.
