Software dev looking for daily edification
June 22, 2017 2:33 PM Subscribe
I'm working on creating good daily habits, and I'd like to incorporate some programming/CS/software dev exercises while I'm between school and work.
I'm a recently graduated CS student (new to industry). As a young student I was the nocturnal kind of programmer, staying up until 5 or 6am to get in the zone. Now that I am old and have a job I'm adjusting to normal daylight hours and forming healthy habits.
So I sometimes lack a little energy and focus during the day. My natural state is a bit like inertia. For other habits (i.e. running, or eating better, or sleep hygiene) I've been using a habit tracker like Streaks to break through the daylight-induced haze. I have about two months before starting a new job. It occurred to me recently that I'd like to use this daily habit building to give myself some daily math and CS related tasks so my brain doesn't turn to sludge before I start working again.
I wrote out the habit as "doing one coding exercise or programming-related reading per day." I could use some suggestions on where to find good (truly engaging and educational, I don't mind going deep) readings, whether that's a blog, a great book, whatever. (I thought about picking through TAOCP... ) For coding exercises-- same. Competitive programming, or good walkthroughs, or whatever. Things that would conceivably be possible within chunks of a couple hours a day. (One thing I did last summer was to get better with vim and write command line utilities in my current language of choice, that was pretty good for keeping me going when I felt a bit depressed about my programming progress.)
Much as with my podcast habit, I am best about this kind of thing when it's sort of effortless to find the next "thing," whether that's because there is a blog with archives I can crawl through or a project with many pieces or even a list I keep for myself. That's what I'm kind of looking for here-- particularly rich sources that are either one-timers I can add to a list, or long and have lots of chapters or pieces to work through to learn about something more deeply.
I'm a recently graduated CS student (new to industry). As a young student I was the nocturnal kind of programmer, staying up until 5 or 6am to get in the zone. Now that I am old and have a job I'm adjusting to normal daylight hours and forming healthy habits.
So I sometimes lack a little energy and focus during the day. My natural state is a bit like inertia. For other habits (i.e. running, or eating better, or sleep hygiene) I've been using a habit tracker like Streaks to break through the daylight-induced haze. I have about two months before starting a new job. It occurred to me recently that I'd like to use this daily habit building to give myself some daily math and CS related tasks so my brain doesn't turn to sludge before I start working again.
I wrote out the habit as "doing one coding exercise or programming-related reading per day." I could use some suggestions on where to find good (truly engaging and educational, I don't mind going deep) readings, whether that's a blog, a great book, whatever. (I thought about picking through TAOCP... ) For coding exercises-- same. Competitive programming, or good walkthroughs, or whatever. Things that would conceivably be possible within chunks of a couple hours a day. (One thing I did last summer was to get better with vim and write command line utilities in my current language of choice, that was pretty good for keeping me going when I felt a bit depressed about my programming progress.)
Much as with my podcast habit, I am best about this kind of thing when it's sort of effortless to find the next "thing," whether that's because there is a blog with archives I can crawl through or a project with many pieces or even a list I keep for myself. That's what I'm kind of looking for here-- particularly rich sources that are either one-timers I can add to a list, or long and have lots of chapters or pieces to work through to learn about something more deeply.
Best answer: Code Katas. There are also a number of other sites that provide similar katas; Codewars comes to mind.
posted by daniel striped tiger at 3:37 PM on June 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by daniel striped tiger at 3:37 PM on June 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
Best answer: You could read a chapter of the O'Reilly Site Reliability Engineering book to give you a preview into (one opinion of) how code in production should work.
posted by batter_my_heart at 5:20 PM on June 22, 2017
posted by batter_my_heart at 5:20 PM on June 22, 2017
If you do a lot of searching for python and JavaScript on google, eventually they'll pop up an ad asking you to do bunch of code challenges as a job screen. I thought they were pretty interesting problems.
posted by empath at 7:07 PM on June 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by empath at 7:07 PM on June 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
Best answer: There's also /r/dailyprogrammer on Reddit. More like every other day, and a mix of Easy, Intermediate, and Hard problems.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:41 AM on June 24, 2017
posted by zengargoyle at 8:41 AM on June 24, 2017
I (try to) read recent CS papers to keep my knowledge up to date. I have a Google Drive and just put 5 or 10 on interesting projects at a time when I'm bored, and try to read them over lunch.
posted by miyabo at 10:33 AM on September 6, 2017
posted by miyabo at 10:33 AM on September 6, 2017
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by foxfirefey at 3:32 PM on June 22, 2017