She built the free coding-practice platform that mentors a million learners, and co-wrote the book on writing better objects.
Katrina Owen created Exercism, a free, open-source platform where people practice programming and, unusually, get real human feedback on their solutions. She built it around 2013 while teaching at a coding school, as an internal tool to solve a plain problem: her students were doing exercises but nobody was reviewing their code. She put it online, it spread by word of mouth, and it grew into a volunteer-run community that today offers practice in more than 70 programming languages and serves over a million learners, all at no cost.
She is also a widely loved teacher and conference speaker, and she describes herself as having “accidentally” become a developer while studying molecular biology, a background that shows in her fascination with how brains actually acquire new languages. Over her career she has worked at places including Bengler, the Turing School of Software and Design, Splice, and GitHub, alongside her work on Exercism.
Her other well-known work is the book 99 Bottles of OOP, co-written with Sandi Metz (a later edition adds TJ Stankus). Fittingly, the book grew out of Exercism: Sandi worked through the “99 bottles of beer” exercise on the platform, the two compared refactorings, and a whole book on object-oriented design fell out of the conversation. It is a patient, worked example that teaches the same instinct Sandi distilled elsewhere as The Wrong Abstraction: that reaching for a shared abstraction too early can cost far more than a little honest duplication.
Related: Sandi Metz · The Wrong Abstraction · Duck Typing
Sources
Sources
- Katrina Owen’s bio (kytrinyx: creating Exercism, molecular biology, employers, co-author of 99 Bottles): https://exercism.github.io/kytrinyx/
- Exercism (Wikipedia: created 2013 by Katrina Owen while teaching; open-source, free, mentorship): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercism
- Exercism (the platform itself): https://exercism.org/
- Exercism and 99 Bottles of OOP with Katrina Owen (Changelog Spotlight: the book’s origin on Exercism): https://changelog.com/spotlight/2
- 99 Bottles of OOP (Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen; what the book teaches): https://sandimetz.com/99bottles