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Self-Improvement Idea

Peter Pascale
I've already found this helpful, thought I would pass the idea on:

The nitpickers are providing a lot of valuable feedback. What if a student collected the best points of that feedback, and reviewed it before making a future submission. If you did this enough, you might begin to catch errors, bad-style, and just plain bad choices AS YOU CODE! This is the major intention of code reviews in many software dev processes. In fact, Extreme Programming goes as far as saying that code reviews are so good, lets do them constantly (the idea of pair programming - 2 coders, one terminal).

As a graduate student I took a writing seminar. One of the principles was to identify common flaws you make in your writing. Then go back and look for them. As an example, my writing offen suffered from poor transitions. By cataloguing this, I was able to go back and catch it more clearly. Eventually, I was writing better transitions the first time, as I was thinking about it earlier and earlier in the drafts, until it became a natural part of my writing. I think the same could work for code.

If this is unclear, I can post a few examples from my early submissions.

An added benefit is that you will clear the hurdles faster, the nitpickers won't be bogged down with you making the same style and efficiency mistakes.

Peter

bill bozeman
I like your idea Peter. That is something I need to do more myself.

Bill

Jyotsna Clarkin
quote:
Originally posted by Peter Pascale:
If you did this enough, you might begin to catch errors, bad-style, and just plain bad choices AS YOU CODE!
By cataloguing this, I was able to go back and catch it more clearly.
An added benefit is that you will clear the hurdles faster, the nitpickers won't be bogged down with you making the same style and efficiency mistakes.
Peter

Hi Peter,

I really like your idea. I would like to know a little more about how to do this. I've just started the assignments. Anything that will help me correct bad-style and bad choices is a GOOD thing.

Please tell me more..
regards,
Jyotsna


ryan burgdorfer
The way I implement this is as follows:

I have all the assignments done in advance, up to the first Servlets assignment. (This gives you something to do between nitpicks initially). Whenever I get back a nitpick on an assignment, I go through all the ones I have already completed and see if any of the nitpicks apply, and make the necessary changes. This improves the quality of all the assignments before I send them in, reducing the number of nitpicks I would have gotten had I not went through and revised them.

Just like Peter's post.

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