Sponsoring the Weekly Challenge

Many of those of you discovering these pages will already be aware of the The Weekly Challenge which is an amazing project led by Mohammad Anwar. If not; it's a site that challenges you to solve a couple of tasks a week in whatever programming language you like.

I have participated on and off for a long while; you'll find content about it on my site.

This week I became a sponsor of the project; taking over from longtime supporter Pete of Perl.Careers.

A few people have asked why I decided to support the project. The primary reason is because of Mohammad; he is a wonderful member of the Perl community and I am glad to find any opportunity to help him out. The second reason, is because I use the project personally. I use the site to practice coding... as in intentional practice. When solving the challenge tasks; I like to try and do Test Driven Development (TDD). So the site is super helpful for me as they are small tasks and I can solve them as I want.

The second way I use the challenges is when learning or experimenting with different programming languages. For example I was learning Elm and solved the challenges in Perl, then that language. More recently in Roc-lang and also in Perl. This is really interesting as sometimes I see the strengths and weaknesses of the programming languages. With Roc as an example; one week the solution was easy in Perl; but required a lot of assistance to find a good solution in Roc as the primitives just were not there. The next week; a couple of lines of Roc did precisely what I wanted as it had methods right there... but Perl didn't.

So... please go visit The Weekly Challenge and try one of the challenges; pick whatever language you'd prefer and give it a go.