This Saturday (November 5) is the Global Day of Code Retreat. This is a special day when developers get together and help one another become better at the craft of writing code. I have participated in this for a few years now and enthusiastically recommend it.
What is a Code Retreat? It’s a full day set aside to learn how to be a better coder. There is a facilitator who will provide any needed instructions and describe the problem and any constraints. After that groups will assemble to write a simple program (generally Conway’s Game of Life) for an hour at a time. This gives you the opportunity to practice pair or mob programming, as well as TDD, and whatever other objectives your facilitator has arranged.
After coding for a while (using any constraints set by the facilitator), you come back and discuss the things you learned in your coding session. Then you try it again with different constraints. You can pick up some very interesting insights from working on an unfamiliar problem with unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar way. It definitely gets you out of your comfort zone to do some intensive deliberate practice.
If you visit the link above, you can find numerous places (most are in Europe) hosting an in-person Code Retreat session, and the languages they will be conducted in. But there are also some online Code Retreat hosts that will welcome all who are interested.
The group in Calgary does something different: since many people can’t give up a whole Saturday, they meet for one hour a day for a week. A week of Code Retreat! You’ll see that option on the Code Retreat site, too.
I’ve always gotten a lot of value out of this exercise. If you do give it a try, let me know how it went for you!