I’ve been working in the DevOps (sysadmin) and cybersecurity domains. That means I work with computer programs all the time and I have to understand how they work. From time to time I also write programs, like when building tools or automating tasks. But how to learn and remember a programming language if you don’t get to program every day?
There’s a similar situation in martial arts. You don’t want to be discovering and learning fighting techniques (only) in a fight. Martial arts’ solution is called kata. It’s a set of fighting techniques that are regularly practiced until internalized. Gokatas is my implementation of this idea for Go programming.
The get started install the gokatas command line tool:
❯ go install github.com/gokatas/gokatas@latestOne practice cycle has four simple steps:
- Choose a kata (bcounter in this case) and clone it. By default katas are shown in alphabetical order but you can sort them by number of lines.
❯ gokatas -sortby lines
❯ git clone https://github.com/gokatas/bcounter.git
❯ cd bcounter- Read the documentation and code and try to understand it. You can use ChatGPT to help you out.
❯ export OPENAI_API_KEY=...
❯ gokatas -explain bcounter- Delete (some of) the code and try to write it back. Check how are you doing.
❯ git diff- Track your progress to stay motivated.
❯ gokatas -done bcounter -sortby last -report
Name Description Lines Done Last done
---- ----------- ----- ---- ---------
bcounter io.Writer implementation 22 9x 0 days ago
findlinks parse HTML recursively 69 3x 1 day ago
err errors are values 48 2x 7 days ago
books sorted table in terminal 55 8x 20 days ago
areader io.Reader implementation 34 10x 20 days ago
clock TCP time server 38 7x 29 days ago
boring concurrency patterns 190 8x 31 days ago
shop HTTP server 43 2x 41 days ago
shift simple cipher 54 3x 41 days ago
proxy TCP middleman 39 2x 41 days ago
parselogs loop over JSON logs 47 2x 42 days ago
netcat TCP client 26 3x 42 days ago
lookup loadbalanced STDIN processing 68 3x 42 days ago
google building search engine 188 4x 45 days ago
findgo walking filesystems 51 6x 45 days ago
fetch HTTP client 49 5x 48 days ago
dup duplicate lines in files 30 5x 48 days ago
direction enumerated type with iota 45 4x 49 days ago
lognb non-blocking concurrent logging 103 7x 50 days ago
Jul Aug Sep Oct
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Mon - - - - - - 1 2 - 4 - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - 1 -
Wed - - - - - - 2 - - 1 - - - 1
- - - - - 2 1 3 - - - - 2 1
Fri - - - - - - 2 3 - - 3 - - -
- - - - - 3 - - - - - - - -It’s important to practice regularly because repetition creates habits, and habits are what enable mastery. Set a goal that you are able to meet and insert it into your daily routines. Start by taking baby steps. After some time it will require much less will power to practice. Your programming moves will start looking simpler and smoother. 🥋