By making a lot of mistakes.
Ask HN: How do you go from being an average developer to a great one?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you go from being an average developer to a great one?
#12As you noted, the biggest thing is practice. But here are a few specific tips that I believe significantly improved my programming ability: 1) Try to get the implementation 100% correct on the first try. I don't mean that you should implement the whole system in one go, but the part you implement should do exactly what you want it to do (i.e. no typos, mixed up variable names, etc.). At first I thought this was a bit…
1) is great advice. It's roughly equivalent to what most music teachers recommend for learning to play an instrument. If you just play all day long you wont improve, or at least not improve as quickly, as if you just play one hour per day in which you try hard to play as perfectly as possible.
Re: Ask HN: How do you go from being an average developer to a great one?
#13Work with people smarter than you
I agree but to even get to that, One probably needs to be good enough or higher than the average bar to get in their company.
Make a point to work with the best programmer in the company (or best that you can get to work with), rather than working with the portion that is inferior to you.
Re: Ask HN: How do you go from being an average developer to a great one?
#14Start calling yourself one. Then work on a prominent enough project that people start believing you. If this doesn't work, write / speak / comment / manage your way to credibility and higher visibility. If a great programmer programs by himself in the forest and no one notices, then no one cares.
Re: Ask HN: How do you go from being an average developer to a great one?
#15pg has you covered: http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html