Roadmap to a better programmer [closed]

Answer 1

For me, there has to be a reason to learn something new... that is, unless I have a project in mind or some problem I need to solve, there's no hope. If that prerequisite is met, then I usually try to get "Hello, world" working, and after that the sky's the limit. So much of development these days is just learning new APIs. Occasionally there's some kind of paradigm shift that blows your mind, but that's not as common as people like to think, IMHO.

Answer 2

Take time to learn about all sorts of coding techniques, tools and programming wisdom. This I have found to be crucial to my development. It's to easy to just code away and feel productive. What about what could be if you just had some more knowledge / weaponry under your belt to bang out that next widget.

Knowledge/know how is our real currency. The more we know the more we can make a better decision about how something should be done and do it faster.

For example, learn about:

•Development Practices, Software Design, Estimation, Methodologies Business Analysis Database Design (there are a lot of great books out there and online resources)

•Read Code - Open Source Projects are a good place for this. Read Programming blogs

•Try to participate on Open Source Projects.

•Look for programming user groups in your town and/or someone who can mentor you.

And yes, as mentioned practice. Don't just read, do and watch how you will improve. :)

Answer 3

• Practice, individually and collectively

• Keep an open mind, always learn new things, don't limit yourself to what's familiar. Not solely from a tech perspective, ui design, people skills, ... Don't be afraid of what's new

• Peer review, talk to people about your code, let people talk to you about their code, everyone has a unique way of looking at a problem and you will learn a great deal from peers

• Love coding. If you love what you're doing, putting in alot of time seems effortless. Every coder needs the drive!

Answer 4

First and foremost write code. Write as much as you can. Tackle hard problems. If you want to be a really good programmer you need to get into the guts of what you are doing. Spend a lot of time in debuggers looking at how things work. If you want to be a good programmer who really understands what is going on you need to get down to the metal and write highly async code, learn about how processors work and why SSE is so awesome. Understand threading primitives and be able to write them as well as describe what is actually happening in the processor. I could keep going here but you get the idea.

Second find someone who knows a lot more than you and learn. This relationship will work better if you are already deeply immersed in writing lots of code.

Third, spend some time in a large high quality open source code base. I learned a ton from the Quake I and Quake II code. Helped me be a better programmer.

Fourth take on hard problems. Push your limits. Build things that you thought were impossible. Right now I am writing a specialized compiler. I have learned so much just working on this for the last couple of months.

Answer 5

eat breath dream the programming language your using (no seriously, it helps)

Answer 6

The very belief in the roadmap's existence blocks the road to perfection.