| I think the following is a reasonable path: 1. Read more books. Turn off Twitter, FB, whatever, and open your Kindle app. But be picky. Don't read crap. 2. Read every day. 30 minutes minimum at the same time every day. 3. Write code that implements what you learn. 4. Write code that is more consistent. Learn to write in patterns. Use patterns that you both learn from a.) books, b.) reading other people's code, and c.) that you come up with on your own. 5. Program by using coding standards. Either your own, or if you're in a company then follow the team's standards. 6. Review what you've written. Identify alternatives to the patterns you've used. How else can feature x be implemented? What do you like about each approach? What do the experts say about each approach. Then read everything you can about various approaches to a given problem and implement as many of them as you have time for. 7. Read some code written by someone way beyond your skill level in a language you know. Take in how well they write. Pick one thing they did well, read about it, understand it, then integrate it into your coding. 8. Rewrite something you wrote at least a year ago. Can you easily find a better way to implement this code? If yes, then rewrite. If not, then read more. 9. Learn one new tool that helps improve your workflow and get to a point of daily use. 10. Speed up. Use automation to eliminate the basic coding that you already know well and that is now wasting your time. Use whatever is easy for you whether its templates, macros, boilerplate, generators or automation. Just pick one and automate away the stuff you've already learned. Repeat. |
sitting down and learning a bunch of patterns and then using them without a deep understanding of why they are useful is misguided, and you'll end up with dogmatic code. not that it won't help, it's just not the most important step. the most important step is to write at least medium sized code bases without putting your ego into them so that you can be savvy to your mistakes.