If you are new to software development, whether starting as a professional or even just learning as a student, you probably find the culture intimidating. The range of skills required to become a “great” developer is vast, with low-level skills that range from a solid sense of mathematics to high-level skills like user-interface design.
It can be overwhelming trying to balance learning all these skills, especially while trying to keep up with the constantly evolving software industry. What can you do to improve your abilities, to get from where you are to where you want to be?
In my 20 years of professional experience, reading books and articles and watching videos is not the important step. The most important thing is…
If you are learning how to play an instrument, it’s no question for most people that you can’t get anywhere until you pick up the instrument and try to play it. And it’s not just once in awhile, either. Instrument practice is something most musicians do every day. Even if they are professionals.
Learning theory and exploring new ideas is, obviously, essential to improving yourself in any discipline. The most important step, though, is turning those concepts into engrained knowledge and muscle memory. In this way, programming is a lot like learning an instrument.
Until you burn in those core concepts — and you will need to continue to learn these throughout your career — you will struggle with the basic components of programming, for example:
On the surface, this seems like a dumb question, but it really isn’t! Practicing an instrument diverges from programming, because you can pick up a piece of music and play that same piece over-and-over until you get better. Programming doesn’t work quite the same way, because once you’ve solved a problem, you can, at best, iterate on that solution to improve it.
That’s an important step, but to really expand your knowledge, you need to regularly find new challenges.
The best way to learn is to find a problem you want to solve, and try to solve it yourself. Maybe you want to automate something, or calculate some value regularly.
Basically keep your eyes open in your own life for things that you would like to work better, or try to improve on something you already use. Then try to research and see if you can solve it. Don’t get caught up in finding a “perfect” solution, rather see how close you can get in a short amount of time.
These little exercises will keep your mind fresh and have the benefit of having no fixed goal, so you can have fun with them.