legalize+jeeves@mail.xmission.com (Richard) writes:

Katrina Owens has created <http://exercism.io>, a web site designed to help programmers get better at their craft through crowd-sourced mentorship. The whole thing is free and open source and all you need to participate is a github account.

I have contributed a basic set of completed exercises to enable the C++ language track. I would love for people from the boost community to participate in the C++ track. I had fun doing the initial set of exercises. Most of them could be completed in under 20 minutes, although the intention is that they increase in difficulty as you progress through them.

For each exercise you are presented with the problem statement and a set of Boost.Test unit tests. The goal is to get a program that achieves the function and is expressive and readable. First you get all the tests passing in order to achieve the desired function, but then revise the code to get it to be more expressive and idiomatic in the language. It's that last part where the crowd-sourced mentorship comes into play -- once you've submitted your solution for a problem to the website, you'll be able to view the solutions other people have submitted for the same exercise in the same language. You can mentor them in how to write more expressive, idiomatic C++11 code. Who knows, maybe you'll also improve your C++11 skills by reading feedback from others on your submissions.

After playing with this for a day, I'd really like to thank you for making this C++ track available, and IMHO, doing it right. The use of Boost and C++11 is a real joy, allowing C++ solutions to shine. It's fun, it's great, try it! As a blind user, relying on things being decently accessible, I am particularily liking the cli to the API approach + being able to use my local environment, instead of being forced onto a web-IDE. This is wonderful. I think it would be much nicer if submissions were handled via git repositories, but that's a feature request for exercise.io, not for the C++ track in particular. Thanks for doing this.

Feel free to comment here or file an issue on the exercism.io github repository <http://github.com/exercism/exercism.io> if you think the C++ track needs more or better instructions or helpful links.

-- CYa, ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕