It was last December that I made the decision to make a complete career change and attempt to learn how to code. It has now been 11 months — how has time passed that quickly? — and I’ve been coding almost every day since then (excepting the odd holiday and weekend here and there).
Tonight I’ll be performing the Roman Numerals Kata at a meet-up for women in tech called Ladies of Code . I was asked to do this event by my mentors who knew I would find it challenging and just a tiny bit petrifying.
‘Kata’ is a Japanese word for a choreographed sequence of movement. The goal of a kata is to repeat the sequence so much that the movements are internalised and become better and better over time.
Similarly to the above, a coding kata is a code problem you solve once then redo again and again and again. The idea is that each time you do it, you refine the way you solve the problem, making the process smoother and clearer.
The first time I did this particular kata, it took days as I was a complete beginner, and getting to the solution independently was tricky.
When I tried to do it more recently I knew how to solve the problem so it took me 25 minutes.
Since practicing for my kata performance, my process has become much faster and I’ve also been using Vim and its incredible shortcuts to make everything slicker. The kata now takes me about 11 minutes on average.
Tonight is the night I’ve been working towards and though at first the thought of performing the kata really scared me, there’s nothing left to do now except to embrace the fear and hope that my hard work pays off.
