[tomx]

I think whether an open source project improves you, technically, depends on the scope of each project. For example, you could make 100 simple CRUD web applications in the same way, and not learn anything from it.

For the projects I tend to work on, reading 100s of pages of documentation is necessary. To create a good solution, I must understand the domain well. I spend many evenings reading books on kernel construction, networking, algorithms and so on. This is improving me technically. When I go into work, the knowledge then helps to make better software.

[ajross]

Isn't your point just agreement with mine? You're reading books (or wikipedia or whatever) as a necessary task in a focused effort to develop software. Clearly you didn't take me to mean that you should never read, right?

But the GP post seemed to be arguing the opposite: that focusing your effort and learning on a practical goal was not a way to "improve yourself technically". And that's the part that lost me.

[kabdib]

I don't budget books. (Well, the actual budget has to do with available shelf space and how much of the floor my wife is willing to let me pile books on).

About ten years ago I read a bunch of books on MPEG2/4 and some other video-related stuff. I wasn't doing much in the field, it just seemed interesting. Eight years later it turned out that the project I was on needed this type of expertise, so I was able to contribute on stuff that people hadn't expected me to be able to. It was fun.

You can't easily foresee this kind of thing. I'll probably never need to know the details of how Vax/VMS did its free page management, but I might run into a related problem, so reading that OS book 25 years ago might pay off.

What I see from people who /just code/ is that their skills rot far faster than people who like to learn stuff. If all you do is code, after ten years you have another 100KSLOCs of Java or C++ or SCHLOPBOL under your belt . . . and who cares?

I like to learn stuff and hopefully get a chance to apply it. Otherwise I'm just a garage mechanic who fixes bicycles in my spare time.