11.30.05
Rent-a-Coder.com
So, while wandering around the net last night, I stumbled upon Rent-a-Coder.com. While I had heard of this service before, this is the first time I had ever actually looked at the site. Initially, I thought, “Sweet! Now I can pick up some money doing odd coding jobs.” While I still may do that, I did find a more useful byproduct of the site for entry level developers, such as myself.
I was browsing around, looking at the jobs to bid on, when I found a simple request that I totally felt I could do. The task asked for somebody to write a VB(possibly .Net) app that would read in two files, compare the two, perform some logic, and then write the output to a third file. Seems simple enough, although VB will never do. Rather than bid on it, I decided to just implement it. If I finished before anybody won the bid, I’d bid on it (I didn’t), and if not, at least I’ll learn a thing or two about Ruby on the way (I did).
Ultimately, I think the best part is it gave me a unique problem to solve. I feel, in general, I have two issue when practicing coding. First of all, I tend to stick to problems that I’ve solved way too many times before (This means you, CyberPet). While it is useful to reimplement old designs when learning a new language, this can only take you so far. Second of all, when I’m not using toy examples, I have a tendancy to use problems that are too large to finish (my hardrive is cluttered with half-finished projects). I get frustrated with a problem, and set it aside. I usually do come back to these projects, with varying degrees of success, but it is still frustrating to not feel the sense of accomplishment at solving a problem. By looking throughout the cheap bids at Rent-a-Coder, I find fresh problems to tackle and stay sharp in Ruby!
Out.