Like the last Lunch-n-Learn I kept searching for more advice regarding how to get better as a developer and I found this wonderful keynote from Mark Bates at the Burlington Ruby Conference.

What I Learned?

  • No one wants to be Ringo
    • Being better is archivable    
  • Practice
    • Contribute to opensource projects
    • Build your own apps
    • Copy other’s peoples apps
    • Build Twitter
    • Build Facebook
    • Write tests for a library (Delete the spec/test directory and start again)
    • Put all in Github
  • Github
    • Contribute
    • Put all your libraries 
    • Fix others’ people issues
    • Improve documentation of others projects
    • Work in others people constraints 
    • All of this will lead you to build your own style and your name
  • Blog
    • Improve your writing and communication skills
    • Write about your projects
    • Dissects other’s people projects
  • Speak
    • Force you to learn new topics
    • Meet new people
    • Free Beer!
  • Networking

There’s a lot of stuffs that I can take from this, I’ve been trying to do most of them, I’ve been contributing to OSS for a while now but I would also love to keep blogging which I started recently and in the near future give a talk; probably at first I will go to the local ruby user group and try there.

From the practice point of view I’m enjoying a lot Exercism and for the tracking down issues I’m already using Codetriage which are two great projects to help anyone improve their craft. I will try to write more about dissecting projects which will be a great way to learn more about reading other’s people code and also to learn new techniques in the process.

In conclusion this was a fun talk which a lot of insightful advices, I totally recommend it.