Focus Switch

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 10

The weeks are flying in. Two weeks down already. I started familiarising myself today with the training materials I’m going to help to deliver at a client. The course is teaching Java from the beginning so most of the constructs I’m familiar with so far. I’m still making sure I do each exercise as the notes suggest (some state to do without an IDE) so that I can easily relate to what the students will be doing in class. The more meaty exercises I’ll start on Monday.

Doing this preparation has felt like a switch of focus. Rather than spending most of the day coding, and focusing on what code I am typing and what test case I should write next, I’m thinking about how to present the material, how to explain a concept. Next week, we’ll decide which parts I should help deliver and I can focus on the explanation details then.

During the course the presenters give demo’s of kata’s. Together with Felipe we fine tuned the Prime Factors kata. I noticed some similarities with RomanNumerals and followed the same approach in making the duplication obvious, and changing the ‘if’ loops to ‘while’ at the right point. The course uses the eclipse IDE so neither of us were fluent with the shortcuts, but I think the performance will still look fluent as we have the algorithm and the steps to get there sorted.

I’m also really pleased that my mentors reviewed my tic tac toe pull request from yesterday. Thanks! The comments pointed out some good improvements to think about so I’ll aim to get them addressed before Tuesday’s IPM meeting.