Hey folks!
With Week 1 wrapping up, I wanted to check in.
(Edited to add:)
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
Keeping the task small and managed, and being ok with not completing 100% of the changes suggested in the task. Isolating a few key things needed to tackle and feeling good about that small improvement.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I didn’t use it but I would assume it useful for some.
What’s great?
The exercises have been common issues than could apply to almost any application.
What could be better?
Would be nice to have a bonus or alternative exercise if you have everything already taken care of.
Overall week 1 has been really awesome!
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
The small tasks that have a clear goal. Because of this you can set a proper start and end goal, and it is easy to get things passed review because of the clear goal
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I only listened to it for the first day, I honestly forgot about it on day two onwards. For me personally, there was not that much use.
What’s great?
The thing I liked the most of this so far is having an accountability buddy. That was a great idea!
What could be better?
I’ve been following @ben and his previous company for a while now, so I’m already applying a lot of the things that were in the exercises this week. Maybe have some sort of alternative challenge if you completed the actual challenge for the day. Or maybe make the goal even clearer so the actual challenge is not the most important part, but the goal is.
…what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
At first, finding where to apply the challenge proved quite difficult. I’d say what brought me back around was quickly moving on to another codebase if I was unable to quickly find a good source to apply it.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
It was easier for me to read the challenge and dive in right away than listen to it.
What’s great?
The tooling and links that have surfaced to help with the challenges has been awesome 
What could be better?
Maybe having some links to open-source projects to execute them on?
External factors played a huge difference for me. How the rest of my workload was situated made a big difference in how I approached adding one small task to the list. If I was working somewhere that had me in a “crunch time” project, I would have quit doing these tasks mid-week.
Not for my sake. If you had a screencast that demonstrated the task or some tips related to the task, I would look at that and listen. For audio-only, I’m not going to bother.
Some of these tasks have been harder to time box than others. On the good side, I’m feeling very motivated to go along with this experiment, give all these tasks a good try, and see what happens. On the bad side, being that motivated means I’m not abandoning fast enough out of tasks that aren’t fruitful. I mainly had this problem with the “get rid of a warning” task, but some suggestions on how balance these decisions in general would be very, very welcome. This doesn’t apply as much to the tasks for days 1, 4, and 5, and I have no complaint with those.
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
A bunch of people in my company signed up together. I think there are six of us and we’re trying to pull in more. We talk about the exercises in Slack. There is certainly a peer pressure factor, but more importantly the rest of the company is actually really supportive of us taking out time to do this. (By the way, we’re hiring!)
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I didn’t use them. Can’t speak for others.
What’s great?
I find that writing about the exercises in the forum is itself good exercise. It helps to gather your thoughts and try to communicate things that are relevant. Reading about others’ experiences is also helpful.
What could be better
I think there should be some strategies for how to not work on exercises way beyond the time we allocated for them. I’ve been toying around with the idea of just setting aside a certain time of the day for exercises without distractions.
Did you try setting a timer on your phone, and when the alarm goes, you have to bring everything back in a working state and commit? For me this always works like a charm when I really need to make sure I’m not going down to many rabbit holes.
Those of you that missed some days, what do you think the root cause was?
I missed the “Day 4 - Deleted unused code”. I was already a day behind when I
started & that day I couldn’t find time to complete that challenge. In general, i think the amount of time I allocated (30 mins) was not enough for most of the exercises.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I didnt use them. I think I would use the videos though.
What’s great?
These exercises made me look into things I have been ignoring or have forgotten about. This is great. It is also very nice that we talk about our experiences in the forum. This gives me insight on how others handled the exercises and also the issues people had. Some great tips too!
What could be better?
Some of the exercises needed more time. Not sure if that can be improved. Maybe have an alternate challenge.
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
I think a combination of the exercises either being explicitly time-gated, or being encouraged to keep it brief really helped. While I could happily spend all day cleaning up old code, the boss would probably be less enthusiastic.
As well as that, making sure that it was the first thing I did that day meant I could get it in before other considerations started vying for my attention.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I don’t personally use it.
What’s great?
The exercises seem to be perfect for getting a meaningful amount done without necessarily committing to a major overhaul. A common pattern I see in the comments is that even if people don’t purge their code base of a particular problem, it shines a light onto how widespread that problem might be, and what habits they can work on.
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
Having the tasks be accomplishable in 20 minutes was great. Making sure to do them first thing helped alot. I almost missed one day, and it was the only day I didn’t do it right when I sat down.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I honestly don’t use it.
What’s great?
I don’t know that I would otherwise take the proper time to do some of these things. I learned a lot of new tricks from the assignments and especially from other people in the forum.
What could be better?
The examples of good READMEs on Day 1 was great. Sometimes the vastness of everything OSS, it is hard to know where to find good examples to follow.
I’d also love some insight and instruction on how to get into more OSS projects that I am unaware of. For instance, just like discovering new music or a new tv show, how does one find new OSS that peaks their interest?
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
I chose a project I care about. That helped me stay committed to the challenges even when time was tight.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
Thanks for providing this! I have not listened, which I suppose is worth mentioning.
What’s great?
Focusing the ‘broken windows’ of the project first is smart. These issues can leave a lasting first impression about the quality of your project. I think that’s a great way to start.
They challenges so far have been clearly explained and manageable.
What could be better? Could any of the exercises use some tweaks?
Day 4 (‘Find and delete some unused code’) was difficult in a precompiled language and I ended up not making any changes. Elixir complains about many of the easy fixes one might look for. I tried unused but it struggled with a Phoenix application, reporting a long list of false positives. I’m not sure how to improve this, but somebody with a lot of precompiled language experience might be able to offer more techniques or suggestions for completing the challenge in this family of languages.
On the whole, week one was excellent! Thanks Ben!
The podcast was a MASSIVE part of the success for me, please keep it going! Managed all five challenges, I found the best approach was knocking it out very first thing in the morning where possible. (Then you get that boost of success riding through the rest of the day!)
This week remind me that programming is not just about code, it helped me to clean old code.
The podcast was a really nice idea.
And definitely I will apply this small exercise to clean other projects as well.
@ben instruction were clear, for me educational and really interesting. I still don’t have large code base on project that I’m working for client, so it was easy to follow. I’m still fresh and trying every single day to learn as much as possible 
Some tricks / commands I didn’t know that exist like functionality in rails rake notes or rails notes, so I learned something new last week. If you include some videos in next exercises it would be fantastic (especially for members like me), not necessary but it would be gr8! I wish you all good and productive week. 
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
Made sure to start the day early enough to get to work on the exercise.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I haven’t listened to any. The forum post is enough for me. The email is good too.
What’s great?
Other than the exercises and the daily pace, this forum. It’s been great to read the tips from the other participants, and to share my experience with them.
What could be better?
At the start of the week I would have said the exercises’ description. But the latest ones were very good 
From the point of view of someone living in Australia, it would be good to get email in sync with my timezone. The fact that the forum post with the exercise is available at the start of my day makes up for that though.
Could any of the exercises use some tweaks?
Maybe the TODO ones could be reworded to make it clear that it’s not about removing all the TODOs, but to become aware of them, and to make progress on at least one.
As an addendum you could link to some pre-commit hooks to setup to avoid committing/pushing those. Or equivalent CI integrations.
I’ve really enjoyed this week. What I think I valued more than the exercises themselves was the act of focusing on the quality. I’ve brought that mindset on for the rest of each day. Thanks for this @ben.
Can’t wait for day 7 and onward .
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
Take a challenge and work in small steps because we don’t have to remove/fix everything in your app. Small improvements and learn the flow. You can create a task in your task list to re-visit to fix/remove all of those issues.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I haven’t tried it yet.
What’s great?
Small and direct to what we could improve in the project right away and no platform independent.
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
In my case we have a whole team participating, so having others working on the CQC at the same time was very helpful for motivation. Support/Encouragement from our company has been terrific. The exercises were also very clear-cut and easy to understand/perform, which definitely helped.
Podcast?
It doesn’t have much value for me, I would much rather read than watch/listen.
Tweaks
The repo cleanup exercise was a little unclear as to whether you intended us to clean up our local or remote repos. (I did both)
Great?
I like the forum a lot, I wish people used it more.
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
I was able to do all 5 because I didn’t have feature work this week, since I was on the customer support rotation. The downtime for that rotation is all about paying down tech debt like this. When I get back into the swing of feature work, it’s going to be very hard to keep this up.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I never listened to the podcast, but I imagine it’s helpful for some folks.
What’s great?
It’s been super helpful when other members of the cohort chime in with, “This CLI one-liner will help you find all occurrences of this.” That’s been a big help.
Probably the best thing has been keeping in the mindset of incremental improvements. The more I do this, the less I feel that our codebase is overwhelming and we should just burn it all down and start from scratch.
What could be better?
It’d be helpful to have the text of the exercises in a linkable format to link to from pull requests. I know that it’s intentionally behind a login wall, but it’d be nice to have an authoritative source to link to.
Those of you that completed all five exercises, what do you think the biggest key to your success was?
Having the whole team do the exercises on different parts of our codebase has been a huge motivator to keep up. It also helps that the exercises really are short, though it’s tempting to extend some of them far beyond 20 minutes.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I haven’t listened to the podcast, myself, so I don’t mind if it stays or goes.
What’s great?
The exercises really are short and language agnostic. The forums generally pile up with helpful comments, and it’s great to read about other people’s experiences with the day’s exercise. Like @nick, I’ve found some good tips and one liners in those comments.
What could be better?
More examples could be useful for some of the exercises, possibly links to OSS projects that display the problem you’re talking about.
What do you think the biggest key to your success was?
Doing it first thing in the morning, having the support/backing of our team/company, and writing about it. These exercises have been great, and I’m looking forward to the remaining ones, but writing about them and discussing them has really helped me to internalize them so that I will continue to watch out for them in the future.
Should I keep the podcast version of the exercises going?
I listened to the first one, but I think the textual examples in the email/forum are easier to understand.
What’s great?
The thoroughness of the exercises and examples, and community discussion. It’s really interesting to see everyone else’s take on the exercises, and how they impact their own codebase.
What could be better?
Nothing specific that I think should be better, but I do find it really helpful when the exercises are more concrete. The Readme one felt a bit too open-ended, it would be very easy to spend hours on it. On the other hand, the most recent exercise from today of extracting a compound conditional is a super concrete thing that’s easy to grasp.
Great work @ben, keep it up!