Looking For A Coding Job? Then You Should Absolutely Follow This Guide!
The best part is that Github is free, Exercism is free, the mentoring is free, the pre-written units tests are are free- it’s all free! All you have to do is put the time into writing the code for the solutions, making the unit tests pass, and then after a while you’ll have something that could impress even the best coders.
If you get stuck, don’t be ashamed to just google, “<problem name> solution <language> track”. Most likely the first hit will be Exercism’s public list of previous students’ solutions (who have chosen to make their accepted solution public, that is). Don’t just copy and paste someone else’s solution though! Instead, go through many of them and try to understand how each person chose to solve it and structure their code. Think about what pieces you like best from each solution and then write your own version. Then check it against the unit tests to make sure it works!
Anyone with a computer and a desire to program should be able to take at least a few a minutes each day to write something into the code editor and save it to git. It’s ok to commit your work to git even if it’s not finished. When doing this put “wip” (short for work in progress) or something similar in the git commit message, and in general try to write present tense commit messages that follow the naming conventions agreed upon for each project.
Install Exercism CLI
- for macOs users:
brew install exercism
Install and run the latest release application file.
sudo snap install exercism
Configure Exercism CLI With Your Token
exercism configure
Error: There is no token configured. Find your token on https://exercism.io/my/settings, and call this command again with --token=<your-token>.
configure --token=11da1e11-1c1f-11b2-b111-c1e1ea11111b
Create A Repo On Github
You don't need to choose any template. Just enter a name for your repository (it can be anything, but I like to call it "Exercism-Solutions"). Leave it public, initialize it with a README, and add a license (any will do- I like to use GPL-3.0).
Then click the big green "Create repository" button.
This should send you to the Github page for this newly created repo. You can click the big green "Clone or download" button here to reveal the url for this repo. Copy the url to your clipboard and use it to clone the repo in your local shell terminal. Be sure to clone the repo in your home folder in order to properly sync with Exercism cli's "Exercism" folder!
cd ~
git clone <github-repo-url>
Use The Git Repo As Your Exercism Folder
rm Exercism
mv Exercism-Solutions Exercism
Give It A Try!
exercism download --exercise=hello-world --track=javascript
Now, let's check that we have git configured properly.
git add .
git commit -m "download javascript hello world"
git push origin master
Where To Go From Here
Once you’re all set up command-line wise you’ll need some text editor in which to work. You could always go old-school and use some thing like vim, but I prefer to have a more mouse-friendly, easier on the eyes IDE. My personal favorite is Visual Studio Code because it is free, lightweight, and supports every language on Exercism via community-developed extensions.
Don’t forget to create a .gitignore file in the root of your project for ignoring dependency folders such as node_modules. Since these can easily be reinstalled from the package.json it’s recommended to not check them into git in order to keep the amount of storage needed down to a minimum.
If you're feeling really stuck on some problem, you can submit your unfinished solution and ask the mentor for help. You could report potential bugs on the language track on Github, and as always feel free to check out my youtube channel and reach out to me directly at @JimLynchCodes! Happy coding! ?