Practise

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 4

Apprentices are sometimes required to perform kata’s, and I have the chance to perform the Roman Numeral one tomorrow if I can write the whole test suite and code in under ten minutes. I practised all day. In the morning it took me twenty minutes. First I honed my test cases down. Then I tweaked the test template offered in Intellij to generate a customised skeleton test case. By lunch I could perform it in fifteen.

Further practise took it down to 13. At the end of the day I presented it informally to two colleagues. The main thing they pointed out that one of my steps was too large, and it needed to be done in smaller increments. Taking that on board and re-doing the kata, I’m back up to nearer twenty minutes and feel less fluent… So I will be doing a screen cast instead.

Still I have become fluent in several intellij shortcuts, and I now know how to customise the in built templates in intellij. Next time I’ll do a practise run nearer lunchtime, so I have more time to take on board the feedback.