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Let learning take time

I've read somewhere that the most time consuming part of programming is learning. Yesterday I got some hands on experience of this when solving three Codility tasks in a limited time. The time given to solve the tasks was generous, still I failed to deliver proper, well tested and clean solutions. And my self confidence dropped a couple of levels.

Then I started thinking of why I was unable to deliver better solutions and I realized I had spent most of the time given not solving the actual tasks, but rather trying out and learning how to do certain things, like slicing up strings, working with date and time and so on, in Java.

The Codility tasks were to be solved using the Structured Query Language (SQL) and Java. Two languages I really wan't to add to my toolbox but have limited experience with.
The second Java task involved (amongst other) extracting time (hours, minutes, and seconds) from strings and converting them to Java objects that can be added together and compared. This was one of the things I needed to learn, and the clock was ticking...

Unfortunately I made a wrong choice here and chose to use LocalTime, mostly because of the nice parse method that directly converts a string of format hh:mm:ss to a LocalTime object. By the time I started to try to increment one LocalTime object with another I realized that what I really wanted to use was Duration, bummer.

Now, after I had submitted the unfinished code (due to the time running out) I actually spent some additional time cleaning up and writing the code how I would have wanted it to be. And in the end I believe it turned out pretty good (for something that is limited to a single file).

A couple of things I have learned from this experience: grouping SQL queries, some more string parsing in Java and how to use the LocalTime and Duration classes (next time I face a problem like this I should be able to solve it in half the time). Most important lesson, keep on learning, but let it take time. Testing skills should be done on skills already aquired, not that you have to learn during the test itself.

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