My take on how to become a better software developer

Originally published on Wednesday, April 16, 2014

I am not a rockstar ninja on fire developer and I do not aspire to be one but I have been pushing myself to learn more about the craft.

This is a list of ideas I am putting in practice to improve my skill set. I hope that someone can benefit from them!

• Find people to pair program with. Preferably people that are more experienced than you. Co-workers, friends, former school colleagues. Distance is not a problem, you can use tools like Skype, join.me and Team Viewer to pair program remotely
• Read code from other people. Good code, preferably!
• Subscribe to training sites like PluralSight
• Find a pet project and build something from scratch. Put it in the wild and try to get feedback from others. GitHub is the place to be nowadays
• Listen to podcasts (in the Microsoft stack these are the ones I recommend Hanselminutes, .Net Rocks!, Herding Code)
• Read blogs from prominent technical people
• Join Q&A sites like Stackoverflow, Programmers and Code Review. Try to answer some questions even if you have to learn them first, ask questions and submit your code to be reviewed
• Join Twitter and subscribe to some technical people. Often they will share links that make a great read. Twitter’s suggestions on who to follow are also useful
• Read books if that is your cup of tea, but it is something that does not work for me when the book is very large.

I hope I gave you some ideas and if you have some more I would love to hear them!