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**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Is that done anonymously? |
**Katrina Owen:** No, it uses your GitHub username and avatar. We've talked about making it anonymous, but for the moment we have just not gone down that route. As you said, the format of the exercise is bite-sized, it's very small, trivial programs like "Calculate whether or not a year is a leap year"... It's mostly 2... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Those test suites are awesome, by the way. My first encounter with Go, right after I started doing the exercises, and immediately I wanted to learn how to do tests, and I'm like "Oh, look at that, there are tests right here", and that's where I started learning tests from. It was perfect. They we... |
**Katrina Owen:** That's awesome. I talked to someone at GopherCon who said that they learned Go -- so they were a game developer in Lua, and when they were switching to Go they used Exercism to learn it. When they started their new job at Fastly, they were the only person on their team that knew how to write tests in ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Oh, wow. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's awesome. Validation right there for you. |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And now the reviews are kind of crowdsourced. These are people with more experience who are kind of volunteering their time? |
**Katrina Owen:** Yes. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So people also sign up to kind of do that, as well? |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. It's hard... There's this asymmetry where people want feedback but don't necessarily want to give feedback or know how to give feedback, how to do a correct review. And it's really intimidating to come in and say, "Oh, I'm gonna give someone feedback on their code, but maybe I'm not really good ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think there's some emotional side of it too, where somebody's trying to step out of their comfort zone and learn something new, and you want to support them in that and not beat them down on what feel like trivial things, too. But you commonly see that with people that are new to code review. The... |
**Katrina Owen:** \[07:34\] Right, and that's part of the thing of being on the internet - you probably don't know the person, you don't know their learning style, you don't know why they're there learning Go... Maybe they're learning programming for the first time and Go just happens to be that language. Maybe they ha... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** But there is also the positive reinforcement type of feedback, and there is a lot of that on Exercism. Regarding comments, I heard the Request For Commits episode number four, which is about building successful open source communities, and the guy said "Well, I have this community, I've built it,... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's interesting... So they kind of picked up the review style and the way to speak to people and are kind of mirroring that? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yes, and then I even told Katrina at one point, "Wow, this is so amazing. You come for the code, and you stay for the comments", because you also learn how to comment on code. You can be giving correct feedback and you can also positive feedback, and how you do it... Katrina is a pro, and you wil... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I love that. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I guess anybody who want's to take time out of their day to help review these challenges more than likely really care about trying to evolve people, and aren't going to be rude, right? Most people who are gonna be rude don't wanna waste their time anyway. |
**Katrina Owen:** Yes, they're elsewhere. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** But you can be rude without meaning to be rude. For example, I know how to do code review and I know what good, empathetic comments look like, but when I'm tired, I comment on things and then I look at it and I'm like "Oh my gosh, I could have said that in such a much nicer way, and I didn't. Ugh... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think an important thing to remember from both sides, and I tell this to some of the guys who are new to code review, is when you're thinking about it, solving the problem is the hardest part, right? So looking at somebody else's solution and telling them how they can refine that to make it a lit... |
So if I reviewed your code, I may have a ton of things to say about your code, but if I was presented with the problem without ever seeing anybody else's solution, I may have suffered from the same things, right? So I think having that empathy and keeping that frame of mind that this evolves as somebody's understanding... |
**Katrina Owen:** \[11:57\] And especially when you're learning a new language, you're not familiar with the standard library functions and the packages, you're not familiar with how scoping works or constants work, so you'll often see a lot of flailing around as people try to figure out how to even get the syntax righ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think that's a fair point. And even with refactoring... Refactoring is its own skill set. There's people who can look at this and they're like "Oh yeah, I just have to check this one method and do this", but it's a whole new world that most people aren't presented with. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I used to call that "running it through the Erik machine", because I would write horrible code and then I would give it to Erik and he would make it beautiful and performant and work. Erik's good at that part. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Well, I'm not always... I mean, I look at a lot of code too that even I have written, and I'm like "This doesn't look clean" and I'm not quite sure how I wanna start to make it prettier and more abstracted. Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes. |
**Katrina Owen:** It really does. I talk about refactoring a lot, and I've just realized recently that when I do a talk about refactoring, I'm showing someone the clear path, the obvious path, the one that's obvious in hindsight, and almost always when I'm actually refactoring for the first time, I have no idea where i... |
Whenever I talk about this in public, I forget to mention that part, so it looks like I have this godlike view of the end product, and it really isn't true. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I commonly, for problems I'm not certain on where I'm going with them, I commonly will spike out something that kind of works, and then throw it away and start completely over now that I have a better view of the actual domain. |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah... One of the things I've been learning over the past few years is how to take much smaller steps so that everything is passing the whole time, and as soon as I decide that I don't wanna go down on one route, I can back it out and the test suite's always green. |
**Erik St. Martin:** The whole red/green/refactor? |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, mostly like "Stay green when you're refactoring." A lot of people will -- something will break, and then they're like "Oh, I know what to do. I know where I'm going with this", and then it will be broken for a long time, sometimes hours or even days at times, until they get everything back under... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's a fair point. I'm guilty of some commit bombs myself. I refactored a ton of stuff and the test suite's not quite passing for a while... |
**Katrina Owen:** Well, in Go, with the compiler telling where all your types are wrong and where you need to update the APIs, it's actually a lot easier. I'm more reckless in Go than I am in Ruby. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[16:02\] That's interesting to hear, because I think I was significantly more reckless in Ruby than I was in Go. Maybe I was writing poor Ruby, or maybe I'm writing poor Go, I don't know. Which do you think it is for you? |
**Katrina Owen:** I don't think it's either, I think it's just the style. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I think I'm less reckless at this point in Go than I ever was in Ruby, even after a few years of doing Ruby, because of two things. One, the syntax is so short, it's so easy to memorize what you have to do. And two, although you haven't memorized it yet, the compiler is giving you feedback, so yo... |
**Katrina Owen:** I wonder if 'reckless' is the wrong word here, because with Go I trust that the compiler is going to tell me about every single mistake. So if I do some complicated rename or start working on changing a type, I know that the compiler is going to tell me about every single location where I have to make... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** It's almost like you're more carefree. |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** You tend to, rather than looking at it from the negative side, like "Oh, you can be more reckless in Go", maybe it's just you don't have to scrutinize your refactorings as much; you don't have to examine them and think about all the dynamic places that might cause problems during runtime. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, I can see that. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Before we move on to other things, I wanna go back to Exercism real quick because I think we really should try to shout out and get people involved. There's multiple ways to be involved, right? By submitting exercises for languages you're familiar with and by helping to review code. Where is the be... |
**Katrina Owen:** There is a third option, secret door number three, and that is go to the Go language track repository on GitHub and watch it. Then when issues come in, help respond when pull requests come in, help review them. That would be an immense help to keep the language going and the people happy. So that's th... |
The other pieces that you've already mentioned - doing the exercises, submitting them to the website... Once you submit, you get access to all of the other solutions to that particular exercise, so you can browse around and look at what other people have done, how that's different from yours; you can learn from reading... |
I have a little bot that does some linting and a little bit of static analysis in Go, to give feedback. It's mostly stuff that I was giving feedback on over and over again, so I just added this to the bot so that it automates that a little bit. But yeah, do the exercise and get feedback. In order to give feedback on an... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Can you give us the link to that GitHub thing again, so we can make sure we get it in the show notes? |
**Katrina Owen:** Yeah, for sure. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Awesome. So this is a good opportunity for us to take a break and thank our first sponsor, Linode. |
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