Experience and Problem Solving

Solving an Exercism exercise at a Ruby meetup via Pair Programming

Overview of how the meetup was organized

● People were grouped in pairs comprising of a senior and junior● The kata that people had to solve was only revealed on the day of meetup

○ People were asked to solve the Roman Numerals Kata● Format of the meetup

○ Two 45 min sessions for problem solving○ Two 30 min Breaks, one in between the sessions and towards the end

● Discussion format during the breaks similar to how it is at a code retreat○ How do you think it’s going so far?○ What do you think could have helped you doing it better?○ What are you going to do different in your approach for the second

half of the session?

Question to one of the teams that completely solved the exercise by the end of 2nd session

● Things that stood out for me(in terms of problem solving) from above answer○ Excited to solve the exercise○ Practicing TDD religiously

■ Passing one test a time○ Identifying Patterns along the way of solving the problem

Their Answer

The recommended way of problem solving on exercism

The correlation between things at the meetup and at work

● I currently work for Sephora Digital SEA - a company selling beauty products● Had an upcoming big sale for Sephora Australia● Some performance bottlenecks needed to be addressed before the sale

○ Shopping Cart Page - one of the bottlenecks● Few days(time constraint) before the sale to address these performance issues● Problem was identified at a high level through some load tests● My challenges

○ Narrow down to where exactly were redis hget calls were being misused○ Only a few months of experience into the codebase○ My domain knowledge was limited around samples tiers○ Using a part of redis that I hadn’t ever used before

Free Samples that are given to a customer as part of the cart checkout

Applying my meetup learnings at work

Before making some performance tweaks

After making some performance tweaks

Applying my meetup learnings at work(contd.)

Takeaways

● Don’t let your lesser experience with something get in your way when you’re problem solving

● Problem solving attitude and approach matters a lot

Thank You

● Credits ○ Katrina Owen - For Exercism and for the inspiration(via the

exercism newsletter) to share one’s story via a talk○ Everybody who has contributed to Exercism○ Everyone who were directly or indirectly involved with the April

2016 BRUG meetup on exercism● Related reading

○ For a detailed writeup of how the exercism related ruby meetup was organized, one can read this post I wrote on medium

Mohnish G J - Programmer @ Sephora Digital SEA

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