[pwk]

I do learn somewhat from reading stuff online, but it's often because I'm inspired to play around with something on my own. Like a lot of people, I learn the most by doing. So I think the point that a lot of people are making is a good one: write more code.

There are some concepts from practicing music that might be interesting to consider in the context of coding:

1. Play music that's beyond your current abilities; playing the things you already know won't help you improve. This is pretty easy to put in the context of writing software: don't write yet another little ruby app, write it in Haskell or Io or Clojure or Erlang...

2. Isolate weaknesses and focus on specific things to improve. I think this is tougher in software than in music, because a good musician is always listening to good music to benchmark against, but it's probably not as common for developers to constantly be reading good code. So, maybe go find some good code to read and find ways in which it's better than what you're churning out.

3. Don't practice music with mistakes; it's better to slow down and get it right than to learn it incorrectly. So maybe a test suite for that weekend hack isn't a bad idea...

I should do more of that... in both music and coding...