I recently had my employer buy "Mastering Software Technique" and I just finished reading it. Because your book matched so closely what I had been looking for, I wanted to thank you for writing it and share the story of how I came to know of you work.
Next to being a Software Developer I am also learning to draw and paint in my free time. Since my wife encouraged me to get into it three years ago I constantly felt that the experiences of making pictures and writing code had something deeply in common. This feeling became much more tangible when I read "The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation" some weeks ago. My intention was to learn how to create more vivid figure drawings, but in addition to that I discovered so many parallels between animation and software development throughout the whole book that it made me think. And when I read that even experienced animators took weekly evening art lessons in figure drawing I felt that this kind of constant practice of the fundamentals was what I needed to improve my coding. The next google search let me right away to your book and I was thrilled to read that somebody had a similar idea already worked out.
I already did some coding studies and I am very pleased with the overall experience. Finally I'm relieved of the self-inflicted pressure to push through with a way too large software hobby project. Also I'm less frustrated about the fact that I sometimes do way more code reviews, testing and requirements analysis at work than coding. And I really notice the beneficient effect on my learning of focusing on a single thing during a study which is tailored to letting me practice it. Finally I think your book unveiled the fundamental commonality of representational art and programming which makes both equally fascinating for me: they're both about creating the illusion of life. Painting a really vivid character and programming Conway's Game of Life are actually very similar things.
So thank you for working out the idea of coding studies. I'm planning to do lots of them.
Cheers, Andreas Thielmann