[logan5]

Work environment doesn't necessarily always help. It comes down to how experienced and brilliant co-workers are plus whether they care deeply about clean design and clean code. In some places, there are A programmers from which you will learn a lot. In other places, it's broken windows, so the attitude of the people is 'it works, so why bother.'

To answer your questions, I find awesome code and techniques through books and from the internet. Keep reading new books even if you have become familiar with the language. Try working on your own projects because different problem sets demand different way of solving things which will not be offered through normal work environment. Write small games, puzzle solvers, etc. Understand how things work and be familiar with the tools which you can then incorporate back to your work.

Another way of improving your programming skills is by learning a completely different programming paradigm. That will make you think differently when solving problems even if you don't end up using that particular language.

[lunarprose]

Thanks for this--I think the guys I work with do care about clean design and code. However, as soon as we start to discuss bigger concepts like that the lingo changes from practical to highly technical. Having little computer science background, I definitely end up missing some of it.

Thanks for your thoughts. :) I think I definitely need to focus more on building my own projects if just to keep practicing what I do know and have the opportunity to build something more complex.