As most of my projects done in C# were done in a leisurely on-off basis with plenty of time to brainstorm, athletic software engineering is quite stressful, and maybe in my case likely to cause mistakes. The practice WODs were quite helpful in preparing me for the next WODs. I believe this is a great way to learn and create code in short periods of time, but it may not be as effective when the project becomes exceedingly large. Usually brainstorming first helps.
During the first pracice WOD I used the announcement time to brainstorm ideas to tackle the WOD in my head BEFORE the WOD actually began because the instructions were on the board. This will likely never be the case for future WODs because this seems to simplify things a bit too much aside from the bug-hunting. That being said, majority of the 8 minutes was spent fixing the polarity of my less/greater-than syntax and completing the sketchy else-if chain that makes up the final output.\
The WODs might help speed up my programming, however I am typically a slow programmer. While my 8 minutes time on this WOD sits in Rx, most of that time was technically saved by using the provided NOAA code on the presented WOD instead of hand-typing it. Again I did have time to think about the WOD before the clock even started.