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in reply to Perl Exercises

If you are "leading a perl Team of 7 members", why do you need to test their knowledge? Seems like you would do better to teach first (if you have the ability yourself) than test them on something they don't yet really grasp.

When I first began to use Perl, I received some minimal formal instruction and then was almost immediately responsible for the oversight of the work of 8 or 9 other developers. Rather than try to emphasize the gulf between my 'knowledge' and that of the rest of the team, I organized a weekly code review and seminar in which I encouraged others to teach what they had learned over the course of the week. While I still did much of the teaching, I found that many of the developers grew rapidly in their enthusiasm and understanding of Perl as they were permitted to learn through teaching. Sometimes I had to gently correct, and sometimes we all rushed off doing the wrong things in the wrong way (with my ignorance compounding theirs). We grew closer as a team and I learned a lot along the way.

I don't think there is any substitute for learning while doing real work. Why not divide your next project into manageable chunks and parcel it out to your team members? If you spend some serious time on code reviews (and adopt some of the write-to-test advice you received from Herkum) you'll make good progress on your project and teach as you go.


No good deed goes unpunished. -- (attributed to) Oscar Wilde