| At first glance, this looks like a nice list. I really have nothing bad to say about anything on it. It's a list of 12 items without much guidance about how important each one is and how much time to spend on each. To put things in perspective, I think that BUILD should be > 90% of your time. I'd like to share my personal experience with OP's list. Please understand that this is not advice, just one programmer's experience of what works for me. Perhaps I'll try some of OP's recommendations, but I'm not sure... READ Hacker News An hour or two every day for 4 years. Thousands of comments made. Hundreds of bookmarks saved. Oddly, not sure how important all of this has been contributing to my work. It's been very important contributing to my sanity. I'm alone most of the time except for my cats and you guys. READ Stack Overflow Never been there. READ a bunch of other stuff I just follow links from Hacker News front page. Lots a great stuff out there. Still, not really sure how much benefit has been to my own work. ATTEND local meetups I have. I don't anymore. Met some nice people. Didn't help my work at all. ATTEND OpenTech 2011 Never heard of it. FIND an itch to scratch Have built about a half dozen things for myself. Not really much use for others, but a great way to practice with new technology. RESEARCH cloud Good idea, but my experience limited to Amazon. RESEARCH HTML5 Good idea, but haven't done much. JOIN Twitter, Delicious Never did. Probably never will. Unless I see some good reason. (I haven't.) PLAY Critical! I play with stuff every day. BUILD 90% of what I do. Oddly, I look at very little other code, but I do try to reverse engineer a lot with what I'm already playing with. POLISH I do nothing mentioned by OP. I just refactor, scale, and fine tune as I see fit. I'd like to add one more thing to the list: FIND A CUSTOMER You'd be surprised at how fast you get good when you have to. |
Play + Build should absolutely be 90% of the activity of a would-be developer. Most of the rest of the list could go away. Research is fine, but really only if you're going to _use_ it.
I do find local meetups beneficial, _particularly_ if you can work yourself up to do a presentation on something. Presenting on a topic is a great way to make yourself learn it better.
++FIND A CUSTOMER: Maybe the best advice ever. Has the additional benefit that unless you completely mess up, you get paid. And if you do mess up so badly that you don't get paid, hopefully you learn something about how not to repeat that.
I have to add (since this is a list for people learning): learn git or mercurial. If you know one, you can pick up the other. I don't really think this is optional.