Ways to improve your programming skills and reach your full potential.

There is a high demand for developer jobs and technology keeps changing rapidly, which means that it can be difficult to stay relevant in the field and keep moving up the career ladder. We have put together a list of things you could do to become a better programmer and help you enhance your career.

Always be in student mode

As you know experience is very important. Develop and improve your skills by experimenting. We understand that not everyone has the time, but if you can try and take on a big project. You can learn a lot by just trying to take on something new like building a new app to broaden your ability and your skills.

You can start by learning a new language because it is the most effective way to force yourself out current habits and learn a new way of thinking. Be curious and don’t assume you know the best or know everything.

Collaborate

Organise workshops or spend time on Stack Overflow because this is a great way to bond with other people in your industry and collaborate. Contributing to the open source community will enable you to get feedback for your projects from peers and you might also find it empowering.

onsider working with programmers that are more skilled than you. That way you will learn a lot. This is important when you are starting out your career, look to work in a large team so that you can work with senior developers who will be able to teach you a lot. A way you can do this is through pair programming. Where you will be pair up with another developer. One person writes code and the other watches and you switch roles every few minutes. This is a fully immersive learning experience

Improve your soft skills

Soft skills are vital for your professional development. It’s important to be able to communicate with clients and present yourself in an engaging way. Ultimately this will make your professional life much easier. Find out more about soft skills that could help you improve your career here.

Don’t forget to take it easy

As we have mentioned before there is new technology coming out all the time so that means there are always new things to learn. It can feel like if you take any time off, the tech world will move on without you. But it is always good disengage here and there because you may find that you will come up with new ideas when you are not working. Plus you do not want to burn out.

Try out the Feynman Technique

The Feynman technique is a mental model that was coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The idea is that you learn by teaching someone else a topic in simple terms and analogies so that you can pin point the holes in your knowledge. Once you have identified the gaps go back to your source of knowledge and teach yourself the aspects you are less familiar with.