The Amazing Benefits of Exercism

A couple of months ago, a good friend at work (@rodeoclownII) sent out an email (or blog, or Slack message, or something) about exercism.io. It’s a cool little website for practising programming in various languages (currently about 45) by implementing koans, or small exercise problems.

I’ve been working through the Kotlin problems since the start of the year and I’ve found it super useful, so I thought I’d write this quick blog to recommend it to others.

Why I like exercism.io so much

Actor Anthony Hopkins seemingly performing an exorcism with the words "Back to hell, demon!" Probably unrelated to exercism.io

Just to be clear, we’re not talking about this kind of exorcism.

The most obvious benefit of this site is the opportunity to practise using different elements of the Kotlin language and standard library. Being challenged to solve problems which you might not necessarily come across during day-to-day work can lead you to discover parts of Kotlin that are really useful but which you otherwise might not have found a need to go looking for. Also, the problems are all implemented in a test-driven way, which feels very natural for me as a long-time practitioner of Extreme Programming/TDD. Continue reading