My notes on becoming a better developer

Following on from Justin Etheredge post about becoming a better developer, I would just like to add my nuggets of info.

I find that it is very easy to get swamped by the amount of info out there just on .net. I am currently following three simple practices at the moment; set clear goals, refine a topic scope, and time management.

Set clear goals: Have a six month plan with some simple goals to achieve by the end of it. Don't choose too much to do, you will just be overwhelmed. Also don't choose too little or you could find yourself getting bored reading and practicing the same subject matter.

Refine a topic scope: Ok I don't know what to call this advice, so I will explain what I do. As part of my RSS aggregation, I have a separate subsection in my reader (I use WizzRSS) that is mapped to feeds from services such as DotNetKicks and now StackOverflow as well. So for example one of my goals at the moment is to study agile methodology and design patterns, I will have feeds set up for unit testing, singleton pettern, facade pattern, etc. This way I can concentrate on a sub topic of one of my goals without expanding out and getting lost in information overload.

Time management: I use to find it so easy to get caught in the trap of spending hours reading blogs, going from link to link sometimes ending up reading about a subject that has absolutely nothing to do with development and the task at hand. What I do now is limit myself to a max of 30 minutes in the morning and 30 in the afternoon to read the posts I am most interested in. Link collections such as Jason Haley, Chris Alcock, Alvin Ashcroft and Steve Pietrek help out a great deal. That way you can quickly cover anything new in the .net world. If I find I am running out of time or I am reading a post that is just too good to leave, then I will drop it in to Evernote for reading at a later date.

Something I do want to try early next year is to look at other peoples code. Download an open source project and open it up and see how it works. This is similar to what Scott Hanselman is doing with his Weekly Source Code.

1 Comment

  • @CodeThinked
    My strategy?
    Read and practice. Read as much as you can about development wether it be from books or blogs. If it is a general development topic I tend to favour books as they don't go out of date quickly. Two of my current favourites are Refactoring by Matin Fowler and TDD by example by Kent Beck. If I am after learning about more language specific topics I tend towards web sites and blogs in particular especially blogs from the CodeBetter.com community. But my main emphasis which I am attempting to explain above (perhaps not to well) is be careful and not get bogged down trying to cover a large area at once. I try to concentrate on subsets of the whole development cycle, that way I find it easier to digest. Practice; try to incorporate new things you have learnt about in your current projects or start a new private project where you can experiment more. Screencasts are a good way of learning how other developers work. The DimeCasts screencasts are brilliant as they cover the subject matter in a short time, also check out LearnVisualStudio.Net.

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