A couple of months back I spoke at the MSDN Live conferences in Norway. One of my talks was on ASP.NET 4.0, and I had some demo code that I used to explain some of the new features. Recently I got some feedback that some people had been baffled about the “quality” of my demo code – why would I bother to write unit tests, apply design patterns and so forth in a silly little demo application? Surely that’s overkill and a sign that I was prone to overengineering my code.

Practice makes perfect

If you want to become good at something, you need to practice. We often talk about this in terms of internalizing a certain set of skills; practicing something until it becomes second nature to do it. There are many ways to accomplish this. One that’s become popular lately, is katas. A kata is a Japanese concept, which basically means to practice a fixed choreography over and over.

Check out this recording of Uncle Bob Martin performing his Prime Factors kata, in which he’s honing his TDD skills in Ruby:

Another great example is this video by Chad Myers, in which he implements FizzBuss in less than 4 minutes with the mouse disabled:

Solving small, insignificant-seeming problems in order to try out and practice methodologies, technologies or patterns is a great way to become familiar with these so that they are in your toolbox ready to be applied instantly when you’re on a deadline and don’t have time to fool around.