Exercise 5: cat

With Exercise 4 you began the work of finding out what blocks you. It was a simple challenge of conducting a spike researching how best to get command line arguments from a user. The real purpose of the exercise was your lab notes on what you do to get started. Did you discover anything you need to change? Any strange habits or setup issues? In this exercise you'll be creating a replica of a simple command called cat, but your real purpose is to pick one thing to change about your setup so you get started faster. Remember that the point is not your implementation of cat. The point is how quickly can you get started and can you do something useful in 45 minutes.

As with the previous exercise, stick to the 45 minute deadline. Setting limits on how much time you'll spend on an exercise is a useful technique to get you into the mode of coding. In fact, if you can warm up with a 45 minute hack every day that would be an ideal practice going forward. Before you can do that you'll need to get better at starting, so figure out what friction you're going to kill today and let's begin.

WARNING: I will state this one more time so that it is clear: You cannot fail at this exercise. If you approach the 45 minute limit as a graded exercise and set any expectations for how well you should or should not do then you are doing this wrong. The correct way to think about the 45 minutes is simply a device to kick you in the rear and get you going. It is not a test. I repeat, it is not a test. Keep telling yourself that so you relax and just go for it.