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What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

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Re: What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

#4

Post by farout »

program. recreate ones in tutorials from scratch several times. Then modify them to make them do what I wanted them to do. Then create my own.

Program 16 hours a day. 7 days a week. Then sit and beam at my work.

PS don't program 16 hours a day. I had put ice packs later on my arms from the pain.

also get a super monitor, awesome keyboard, and a comfortable chair.

Re: What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

#5

Post by jefe78 »

Co-founded a tech startup as CTO with no developers on staff - yet. I ended up having to code the tools I wanted/needed and learned things I would have never learned if I'd just, "learned to program" in my free time. Have a goal.

EDIT: I have a comp-sci degree; it taught me very little about 'programming'.

Re: What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

#7

Post by farout »

grammr wrote: post #6

Write code with testing it in mind. Testing is often introduced far too late in the programming learning process, if at all.

Every book I read by a real-world programmer - never does this. They always put testing in a separate chapter or never address it at all, example: programatic programmers.

Even any tutorials online or in a user group - it's never done. It's always talked about. I come from a engineering background so I really wanted to programming the "right" way. But here is so little code that includes testing that I can use to "tutor" myself. Even opensource.

I find this very odd.

Re: What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

#8

Post by codeslush »

farout wrote: post #7
grammr wrote: post #6

Write code with testing it in mind. Testing is often introduced far too late in the programming learning process, if at all.

Every book I read by a real-world programmer - never does this. They always put testing in a separate chapter or never address it at all, example: programatic programmers. Even any tutorials online or in a user group - it's never done. It's always talked about. I come from a engineering background so I really wanted to programming the "right" way. But here is so little code that includes testing that I can use to "tu…

Have you looked at this Rails tutorial? http://railstutorial.org/chapters/

Source code control, deployment and testing are all baked into the tutorial from the very first section where coding is started. It's also available in print form.

Re: What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

#9

Post by iamwil »

For me, they are:

  * become more sensitive to your daily pain points and 
    move to eradicate them
  * read other people's code
  * before sitting down to build anything, think: 
    "is there an easier way to solve it?
  * learn about good architecture and engineering 
    practices, but don't worry about them until 
    a) you know what you're building 
    b) they're a problem.
  * learn programming languages in different 
    programming paradigms.

Re: What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

#10

Post by farout »

codeslush wrote: post #8
farout wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every book I read by a real-world programmer - never does this. They always put testing in a separate chapter or never address it at all, example: programatic programmers. Even any tutorials online or in a user group - it's never done. It's always talked about. I come from a engineering background so I really wanted to programming the "right" way. But here is so little code that includes testing that I can use to "tu…

Have you looked at this Rails tutorial? http://railstutorial.org/chapters/ Source code control, deployment and testing are all baked into the tutorial from the very first section where coding is started. It's also available in print form.

Thanks, I will when I get back into rails. I have given up on it as of right now. It nice to know there are more resources that include testing than there were 2 years ago for rails.
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