Exercism

Exercism is exercism.org, a place to learn new programming languages through TDD practice exercises.

Journey

Some thoughts about my Exercism journey …

• I can pinpoint the first time I ever heard about Exercism: this Stackoverflow bash question.
• My first exercise submission was about 3 hours afterward: Hello World on the bash track.
• My first PR was about 7 months later: porting the all-your-base exercise for bash.
• I ended up authoring 60 bash exercises and adding contributions to another 29:

  $ jq '.authors as $a | if ("glennj" | IN($a[])) then input_filename else empty end' exercises/practice/*/.meta/config.json | wc -l
  $ jq '(.contributors // []) as $c | if ("glennj" | IN($c[])) then input_filename else empty end' exercises/practice/*/.meta/config.json | wc -l
  

• and then I spread out to other tracks (like a virus…):
  • tcl
    • 117 practice exercises authored
    • go live Sept 22, 2020
  • wren
    • 16 practice exercises in 2021 and 2022
    • I didn’t contribute to the creation of the track, just added exercises and some contributions to wren-console and related repos.
  • awk
    • 40 practice exercises
    • go live Jul 6, 2022 (can’t find a tweet for it, maybe it was just on Slack)
  • jq
    • 35 practice exercises, 12 concepts, 11 concept exercises
    • go live Jan 18, 2023
  • #12in23
    • I’ve been helping tracks get enough exercises for the monthly badges:
      • ballerina, cobol, fortran, 8th
      • I really got into 8th, it’s a fun little language. We worked together to get the testing framework in a bit nicer shape.
      • Did not enjoy cobol, not a fun language.
  • #48in24
    • contributing exercise for tracks to fill up the implementation status chart, particularly Dart, Wren, awk, jq.

My exercises

My exercises are stored in git. This repo includes my mentor notes.

Exercism CLI tool

I prefer working at a command line. The Exercism CLI suits me very well.

Lua

Some notes about Lua on Exercism.