The 30-Day Code Quality Challenge

A free, language-agnostic exercise of will.

Tiny wins, every day.

I've worked on a lot of codebases over the years, and I've discovered a recurring truth:

A steady drum-beat of small quality wins beats occasional large efforts every time.

Big-bang improvements are hard to schedule, difficult to justify, less fun, and don't work as well.

That's why I created this challenge.

Every work day (Mon-Fri), you'll receive a small exercise whose completion will improve the quality of the codebase you work on.

Your job is to implement the change and report your experience back to the group. We'll support each other through the challenges, and celebrate our victories.

Facts, for your perusal:

  • The course is free.
  • The exercises are language-agnostic.
  • Each exercise takes 20 minutes.
  • Completing an exercise improves your codebase.

What do the exercises look like?

Something like this:

  • Run your test suite with the wifi off and see what fails.
  • Grep your codebase for TODO comments. Delete them or create tickets in your issue tracker.
  • Make something immutable that wasn't before.
  • Do something small to clean up that nasty file. You know the one.

Feedback from past participants

“In this course @r00k will give you a whole series of good ideas and you'll turn those ideas in to better code. For me, this worked in both Go and Ruby and I suggest you give it a try!”
Avatar of Fable Phippen

Fable Phippen

@defrag_fable
“Developer friends, check out @r00k's Code Quality Challenge. Our team completed it recently, and it was an awesome experience. We improved our codebase(s) a little bit each day, and learned a ton doing it.”
Avatar of Eebs Kobeissi

Eebs Kobeissi

@EebsKobeissi
“If you're a developer, give the 30 day code quality challenge by @r00k a try. Free, and very, very well done.”
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Travis Northcutt

@tnorthcutt
Never took the time to follow an online “thing”, but @r00k’s 30 Day Code Quality Challenge was a pleasant experience. Awesome community and great ideas to improve your app's codebase.
Avatar of Flo Gächter

Flo Gächter

@neither1nor0

Is this for you?

Yes, if...

  • You're ready to commit to 30 days of Monday-Friday exercises.
  • You want to join a community passionate about code quality.
  • You promise to only use Vim from now on (just kidding).

Ready to commit?

The next cohort starts mid-2023.

Hi, I'm Ben Orenstein!

You might recognize me as the creator of Refactoring from Good to Great, How to Talk to Developers, or Refactoring Rails.

I've spent the last 10 years mildly obsessed with code and how to make it better.

Currently, I'm building Tuple, an app for remote pair programming.

I'm @r00k on Twitter.

Site design by @steveschoger