I’m normally on the hunt of that particular formula to get better at what I do. Lately after lunch I started to watch presentations to learn stuff and as I now have a blog well it’s time to write about what I’ve been learning from those talks.

This is the presentation I saw today from a well known Python hacker, Jessica McKellar:

Jessica McKellar: Becoming a Better Hacker from CUSEC on Vimeo.

What I learned

Characteristics of good developers/hackers

  1. Systematic Debugging
  2. Can break down large problems, architect solutions
  3. Comfortable learning on the fly
  4. Good communicator 
  5. Good intuition

How to get those characteristics?

  1. Pick a doubt that you have regarding anything, share it with someone and then try to come with a project that solve that doubt.It will be better if that particular thing lead you to learn something new in the process.
  2. Contribute to opensource project and publish everything you do. If you don’t know which projects to contribute she suggest http://openhatch.org to get started; I will go ahead and suggest http://codetriage.com which is the site I currently use for this type of things.
  3. Write about something technical this month.

The presentation is quite clear on steps to do to become better at what you do; so I think I will start to try to focus more on what’s needs to be done instead on how I’m doing it.