Ask HN: How do you keep improving?

Many great answers, and many of them encourage people to try new things, and go and try to build new things and try stuff you don't know.

I like somewhat different approach, I would take some project I think its done well, and where I no longer see obvious room for improvement.

Then I would to go github and find same or similar kind of projects, ideally created by companies with strong engineering culture (e.g. Google) and compare how I did stuff to how they do it.

You would be VERY surprised to learn just how much other people would differently solve same problems you have been facing, and you can learn a lot from comparing other people solutions to something you are already comfortable with.

Just because humans have been using something for thousands of years doesn't mean its a safe choice.

I find asking this question to be just slightly misunderstood. I am currently in my 35th year as a developer, and the learning and improving is easy with one simple ingredient: interest. Pursue what interests you, do the research, write your own versions of the latest research, and when stuck contact the authors you're following. You'd be surprised at who responds, and coming from a perspective of interest the response may be more than expected.

I've been doing C/C++ for my entire career, but have also done full web stacks, embedded systems, VFX for feature films, 15 years as a game developer, OS engineer on first PlayStation team, and reaching way back 80's 3D graphics research and Macintosh beta tester and launch developer. All from simply having enthusiasm and a combination of the stupidity to try it myself and then contacting the leaders and asking them what they did about some nit picky point. Next thing, I'm working there.

That type of easy access is only at new technologies. When I was contacting people the digital entertainment industry was yet a dream. EA was maybe 1 year old. I guess my advice is to find something that you find exciting, but is not yet a reality. There are giant industries to be created around software controlled aircraft, everything from IronMan to skytrains, fer christsake. What interests you? Augmented Reality is going to be saturated, but that area is wide open. Hell, everything is interesting. Just be sure to focus. There is success in consistency.

The tool is launched on boot via launchctl on OS X and runs all the time. (https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Dar...) It automatically deletes screenshots older than four days. I use it in conjunction with Workflowy and a web app I wrote called Task Ranger (http://taskranger.com) to keep track of how I spend my time and to come up with improvement plans.

Task Ranger gives me the big picture -- e.g. learning new things is my biggest time sync and takes 25% of my working hours. The screenshots + workflowy give me the micro level view -- e.g. studying unfamiliar codebases is 1/3 of this 25% timeslice.

So now that I know learning new codebases takes a lot of time, how can I get better at that? Well one thing I've started doing is creating a txt file containing basically a manually generated tree of the function calls made by a program. It might look something like this:

    /new_user
      validate_form
      create_new_user
        User(...)
      send_welcome_email
        load_email_template
        pass_to_email_service

That's a toy example of course -- real-world call trees are huge. After I generate this once I can quickly see how the whole program fits together. And I can use it with this feature in Sublime Text where you right click on a function name and then pick "jump to function".

That's just one small example of something I'm trying. It's an ongoing improvement process that I try to allocate time for. The screenshots are just a helpful view toward understanding where my time goes in more detail.

Good question. I think a lot of it starts with motivation. If you are just studying something for fun then the boring stuff does get really tedious. But if you are studying for something beyond the subject, eg, in my case it was acing my degree to prove something to myself, then the competitive side takes over.

There are people out there that devote themselves to memorizing decks of cards or arbitrarily long numbers. Cards or random numbers are not particularly interesting, so these folks invent mind games. They may take each card to represent a particular object and then make up some crazy story involving these objects. Suddenly to them what was mindbogglingly dull becomes tantamount to some epic screen play.

You can employ similar tricks to studying any subject. When studying for my degree there were a few things that really helped. Note taking, notes had to be as vivid as possible. I would always have multiple coloured pens and highlights as possible. Pictures, various sized and coloured text and lots of arrows. My notes became art. Mnemonics and stories were important for the long lists of things.

Also managing energy levels is pretty important. Regular sleep cycles, exercise help maintain focus. Environment makes a big difference. A library is much better than the common room.. Also, slightly controversially, I find the often given advice to take regular breaks when studying was highly damaging. If I allow regular breaks, then my focus shifts to watching for when my next break is. Also in the breaks I would get time to think about how dull this stuff was. So I would find maintaining pure focus for about 4 hours at a stretch much easier. It helps to have a variety of studying techniques to move around in. So moving between reading / note taking, mnemonic memorization, doing exercises, visiting tutors, discussing with study partners helps keep things flowing.