Third Day at Eden

(This post is part of a series documenting my apprenticeship at Eden. For more, visit the archives)

Yesterday I gave a tech talk on Clojure to part of the Eden staff. The talk itself went reasonably well, although I hadn’t prepared anywhere near as much as I’ve prepared for previous talks, and it showed. This really reminds me of how important practice is, especially for speaking to groups. After the talk I ran through the string calculator kata in Clojure with the group.

Having not practiced this at all (as well), and not done that much Clojure in the past month left me feeling a little rusty, and it showed (at one point I couldn’t remember the java api for making a regex out of a string). I will be giving this talk again on Friday at the Software Craftsmanship UK meetup, so I need to practice more.

To get into this practice, I am starting to do a kata every single day on the train home. This week it’ll most definitely be the string calculator, next week I’ll switch to something else (if you have suggestions, twitter at me).