“Become a Better Programmer Through Mundane Programming” is a session that Dan Nguyen and I did at SRCCON this year. Here’s the description from the session page
One of the most difficult challenges for learning programmers is being able to go beyond basic lessons to building “the next Facebook”, or even just applying programming to your work projects. The secret is that programming can be practiced — and used — on everyday, somewhat “mundane” computational tasks. When you learn how to program to do things that are helpful to you, you not only become a better programmer, but you gain insight on how programming fits into the bigger projects you hope to build.
This session will involve both discussion of everyday programming and demonstrations of creating and refining “mundane” programming scripts, with the goal of brainstorming ideas and use cases to expand the scope of problems we can use programming to solve.
The most validating experience was one of the participants showing me some shell script she had written using the t Twitter client to auto-follow SRCCON tweeters.
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