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Exercism.io: Level up your coding skills

Children at playI’ve really enjoyed Exercism.io. This is an online learning platform for coding. It’s similar to HackerRank or Codewars.

The main difference is that for a subset of the problems, you actually have a mentor give you feedback. You download a problem (with tests) and code up the solution however you like. Then you push the solution up to a central repository where a volunteer mentor reviews it. I’ve had a different mentor for every problem. The same mentor stays with you for the duration of one single problem, and gives you feedback on style and API usage. They also provide accountability in a way that a computer grading my code just doesn’t do it for me.

Each language has a track (as well as some specialized frameworks like React). I’m working on two tracks right now. The first is a language I’m intermediate in (ruby). I’ve learned a lot about the standard library as well as ruby idiom. The second is a language I’m at best a beginner at: javascript (specially modern javascript which has changed a lot).

But there are a lot of other languages I’m looking forward to looking at when I finish these tracks (functional languages like OCaml, for one).

A final benefit of Exercism is that each problem is a challenge but not an impossible one. I find coding up a naive solution to the challenge takes about 15 minutes, and I’ll often do that first before I try to refine it to make it a bit better. It’s kinda like TDD but someone has written all the tests for you, so you just get to do the fun part.

Check it out.