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I had a bit of an idea that almost turned into another crank based on yesterday’s blog post “On Fam­ily, Crank­ing and Chang­ing” — the “code equiv­a­lent” for the idea stem­ming from the Artists Way’s con­cept of “Morn­ing Pages”/750Words and the Writ­ing Down the Bones con­cept of “Keep­ing the Hands Moving”.

I made the mis­take how­ever, of ask­ing on twit­ter — never, ever ask a bunch of pro­gram­mers quote “What do you think the char count or line num­ber of a rea­son­ably sized Python mod­ule is?” — never. Just don’t. I’m not even ask­ing that here. Instead, I’m giv­ing you a sim­ple idea for a web appli­ca­tion. Take the imple­men­ta­tion of github’s gist’s/paste­bin, mash it up with a built in code edi­tor (such as Ace), and kick out a programmer’s ver­sion of 750 Words. The goal is not to force peo­ple to share code pub­licly — if they want, let them flip that bit (or just post/link to github’s gist sys­tem). The goal is to encour­age programmers/hackers to explore/write some new:

• code
• tests
• docs

And I mean new — not some­thing bogged down by their every day projects. It could just be a clever one liner ala Raymond’s python tips. It could be a few-hundred-line piece of code that just tracks how many times they’ve watched their favorite show using some cool mod­ule. Just keep the hand mov­ing; just take 3, 10 or 30 min­utes a day and keep a pri­vate code jour­nal of new ideas, con­cepts, etc. Write some morn­ing pages.

Project Euler is algo­rithm prob­lem solv­ing, so it doesn’t ful­fill the goal. Code Kata’s come damn close (see also Cod­ing Horror’s take) — but again, those are focused on pro­vid­ing a prob­lem, and then hav­ing some­one come up with a solu­tion. I’d like some­thing that just sets forth the ideas exposed for writ­ers above, and sets it in a pro­gram­ming context.

If you want, allow users to seed it with sug­gested ideas. So that when a user logs in, they might have set a “pre­ferred pro­gram­ming language(s)” and get a a lit­tle javascript popup with a prob­lem sourced from another user, like say “use python threads” or “write an appli­ca­tion that forks”. This lat­ter part ties into an idea I had stem­ming from Zed’s orig­i­nal “Learn Python The Hard Way” post­ing — too many of these prac­tice sites focus on algo­rithms and math­e­mat­i­cal things that prob­a­bly won’t help you in the next 8 hours. Some­thing that had prob­lems like “send a receive UDP mes­sages from a socket” and the like — focus­ing on com­mon, prac­ti­cal things.

Any­ways so what are the require­ments for “XXXcode” or “xxxlinesaday”/etc:

• Allow signup/signin
• Allow pub­lic shar­ing of journals/non public
• Allow sub­mit­ted “ideas”
• Out­line the idea stem­ming from the Artists Way/Writing Down the Bones.
• Make it look decent (I’m tired of ugly pro­gram­mer sites. Go get some­thing from the­me­for­est if you need it)

There ya go. Take it and run with it if you want. Just stop both­er­ing me about lines of code in a mod­ule. Man you guys can be pedantic.

 

I had a bit of an idea that almost turned into another crank based on yesterday’s blog post “On Fam­ily, Crank­ing and Chang­ing” — the “code equiv­a­lent” for the idea...