Practice Programming Without Getting Caught

Andy Hunt poses the question: can you practice coding and design in the same way that musicians practice? I wrote him because I like where he is going with this or rather, where he is trying to go, but I couldn't make it 'click' internally. This is what I said: where I get stuck is that a programmer can never justify practicing where a musician could. As a musician I'd practice to sharpen the performance, the performance is what pays the bills. As a programmer the performance is all of the time, nine to five... So how can you justify practicing when you should be performing?

Andy responds in his post Practicing Programming on the Job. He acknowledges "As programmers, we are not given that opportunity. It's as if we're dropped in the middle of the Superbowl and don't even know the name of the other team, or how our own team works together. We don't get a chance to practice, in that sense."

I think he is on the same wavelength. It's sort of like: as programmers, we have to come up with ways to sneak some practice sessions into our daily routines. How can we do this? One way would be to disguise the practice as productivity, but fundamentally I don't like the word disguise. Andy mentions unit tests as the means to "practice as you go". Unit tests could build rehearsals into our daily routines without detracting from our productivity. I need to marinate this idea a little more.

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