A few days ago I took on both new and old exercises. The old one was taking on a coding kata, the new one was recording it. As you may know, I’ve had a podcasting website for the past couple of years alongside a gaming channel. These two hobbies help me build a habit of talking on camera. However, I am unfamiliar with recording myself and writing code. In order to fully enjoy the experience, I decided to use a website which I used before, Codewars.
Codewars is a platform that you can use to train and practice your coding skills via small exercises. Some, like myself or Uncle Bob, call these katas. One major benefit of katas is that they don’t take up much time as opposed to a full-blown side project.
Codewars also allows you to check other users’ solutions that you can vote on as being clever and/or matching the best practices you know of. As such, it provides some decent exposure to patterns and paradigms which you may not see otherwise. Sure, working on an open-source project has some similar benefits, but the constraints of such a project can be frustrating compared to a free-form task.
Every once in a while, I return to Codewars but somehow it had been months if not years since I last used it. This return felt quite fresh. As you will see in the video, some bits are frustrating like the inability to paste code. I can imagine they prevent it so that people don’t just paste solutions to problems but one who would cheat that way can just spend time typing other people’s solutions. Another issue I have is the lack of default imports even for “core types” like collections. In the video, I had to remember imports for certain types because I didn’t want to switch tabs while recording.
On top of that, I’m not a fan of editing, I like recording in one go and posting as is. At first, I didn’t edit videos because I didn’t want to spend the time but now I enjoy that it feels more real. No scripting, no jump cuts, none of that. Whether it’s on podcasts, gaming videos or this new format.
Since my gaming channel is named CodingNagger, I figured this would be the right place to share the video. Enjoy!
