A few days ago I followed a link from JoelOnSoftware and stumbled upon Dave Thomas’ Code Kata page¹. The basic premise is that developers should spend time playing around without pressure to explore certain different algorithms, solutions or designs just like musicians or athletes spend time practicing. I think this is not only a great idea but fun, especially because most of the time there is no right or wrong solution. I wish I had enough time to ponder over all excercises, but so far I only found time to think about:

• Kata One a nice and simple design question. It gets more interesting if you add rules like “if the customer spends more than 100$, he gets a 10% rebate”.
• Kata Two implement binary search in 5 different ways, I used this to learn some more Ruby, but still 2 implementations are missing
• Kata Seven code review, I had to fix some old code so it was easy to add this exercise.

¹ This guy might be a agile/pragmatic/ruby guru but the navigation inside his blog sucks. I had to use google to get from Kata Sixteen (the first page I found) to the ‘Code Kata’-page.