- What it is and first steps
I have been recently introduced to a platform that allows you to put into practice your coding language skills in a friendly and understandable environment.
That portal is Exercism, as you may have guessed attending to the heading, and I am gladly surprised by how useful has turned out to be. Exercism is a free, open source, online coding platform that offers code practice and tutoring in 50 different programming languages.
Worth mentioning is that you can easily link your personal Github in order to register your achievements plus, somewhat enrich your portfolio. You only have to follow the instructions provided by the site itself. Easy peasy!
To get started you will go to https://exercism.io/ in your usual browser, choose whatever the language you want to “play” with, to then carefully read the instructions once you have picked the first activity from the list.
You will have to implement the same ritual of commands and procedures before iniciating every new task, which at first it may feel a bit discouraging, however I can tell you that nothing like that. Installation steps are clear, super easy and fundamentally mechanical, moroever all written down in the ‘Instructions’ section. Props to that!
Notwithstanding, a console such as Comander (Cmder) installed and fully operational in your machine results vital.
In this post I will cover only that related to Javascript, basically because it is the language in which I am fully in right now, but of course you will also find exercises based on C++ or PHP, to mention a couple.
- Working with Javascript
As you select Javascript from the list, you will face the following menu, providing the exercises preceded by a filter gadget were you will have the control on what level of difficulty you want to get challenged.
Next up you will have to install the exercise, literally speaking. For that, head directly to the right margin Get Started box, inside the window of the exercise you want to launch.
You will be required to set a folder root where to download all the libraries and elements in order to make it work. Having that set, bullet point number one will be downloading the exercise by introducing ‘npm install‘ in your console.
Successfully downloaded, now you will be directed to your prefered editor (i.e. Visual Studio Code, Sublime, etc.) where everything you need to start solving the given problem will be available at your reach. The name of the activity with a .js extension will read the problem and suppose the area of action.
Another file with ‘.spec.js’ extension will serve you as the testing sheet, showing what it is expected from you and the various testing formulas that will challenge your solutions.
TIP: advisable to give it a look before starting to reason the problem, to get hints and ideas.
- Solving and testing
From here on it is just a matter of coding what you believe it should match the requiements and, therefore, solve the problem. As soon as you trust your solution, you are asked to test it up by inserting ‘npm test‘ in your console.
Main goal is getting green for each test passed, as long as you enable such tests in the ‘.spec.js’ file, in your code editor.
No sooner is your solution completely checked and passed, that you shall mark it as completed in the exercism activity site to, on the following, share it with the community, if you like.
After publishing it, you will have various options to consider. Either request the feedback of a mentor from the exercism community, or review other users’ uploaded answers thus you can reformulate yours and/or get feedback from them too. Pretty interesting, isn’t it?!
If you feel you are still with energy enough to deal with a new one, you can then go hit the next exercise. Good luck and stay strong!
- Final conclusions
Exercism is a fantastic space for those like me who are in quest of testing that previously learned and open to acquire new knowledge and abilities on the way.
Definitely recommendable for all levels users.
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