Becoming a better programmer

Following on from my previous article top 8 tips to get a job in programming I’ve decided to look a bit further into what steps you can take to actually become a better programmer. Below I’ve outlined some of the ways you can be transformed from a lowly code monkey to a silverback code gorilla! (Sorry – the jokes don’t get any better)

Frameworks and other languages

Learn other frameworks and languages and see how they do approach problems and complete tasks and compare it to the way you currently perform the same tasks. This not only gives you new perspectives but it also prevents your skill set from stagnating and therefore leaving you pigeon holed to a particular skill or technology.

Sharpening the saw

Never stop learning and Sharpening the saw. Always try and leave some time perhaps daily or weekly to read blogs, websites and books. Continually finding and learning new information is fundamental to being the best programmer you can be.

Pair programming

Pair programming is a very good way of seeing how people do things differently to you, whereby allowing you to pinch other people’s good ideas and incorporating them into your own. This is one of my favourite techniques and I’ve had a lot of success with it.

Read other peoples code

Reading other peoples code may sound more like a punishment than something you would want to do, but doing it can provide you with great insights into how other people write code and help you improve your own code.

Writing comments and documentation can also be useful – especially in a commercial environment where writing comments can help people understand the code quicker.

Teach/Mentor

Teach/mentor other people, doing this will help consolidate the knowledge that you have and also perhaps highlight areas in which you need to refresh your own knowledge.

Work on projects that capture your imagination

At some point we all feel like we’re stuck in a rut, maintaining and debugging the same bit of code day after day. In an ideal world we’d be able to move onto other projects that may interest us more, but that may always not be possible.

I have two suggestions to help for projects to work on:

Get involved in an open source project

Working on open source projects can expose you to new ideas and people that you may never have met normally. It can also help you regain your enthusiasm for working on projects that caputure your interest and your imagination.

Create your own project from scratch

At work you’re often in the situation where you end up working on just one piece of code or you’re used to having the entire infrastructure around you, working on a project from scratch forces you to think about things that you would otherwise take for granted.

Learn to touch type

Not necessarily an obvious one but having the ability to touch type actually has a big impact on your programming ability. It makes you much more productive and allows you to cover more ground. Not worrying about which keys you have to press lets you focus on the actual process of programming.

What has become apparent to me is that there are many different ways of improving your programming ability, some obvious and some not so. I believe that fundamentally there has to be a strong desire to want to improve and you have to be prepared to put some real effort in on your own time.

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