Internationalization puzzles – or how to gamify a training. by Martijn van Iersel

Encodings. Time Zones. Accented Characters. Daylight savings time. Do these words make you feel dread and anxiety? Amongst programmers, these topics are notorious for being the source of subtle, tricky bugs. Yet knowledge in this area is vital, especially at TOPdesk, where we develop an international software product. So how do we get our junior programmers up to speed quickly and efficiently? How do we make this topic exciting, not daunting? Fresh, not frustrating? To address this, I created i18n-puzzles.com, inspired by the famous Advent of Code. After all, which programmer can resist a good puzzle? Each puzzle teaches a different concept. During my talk we’ll go through a few puzzles together and see the thinking behind their design. What will you take away from this? • See how we motivate programmers to learn through a unique challenge. • Learn the internationalization concepts that all Java programmers should know. What started as an internal training course is now freely available to the public, so you can do it too!