10 Tips to Improve Programming Skill and become better Programmer, Developer

10 Tips to Improve Programming Skill and become better Programmer, Developer

3) Contributing to Open Source, Signing-up mailing lists
Contributing on Open source code, especially from Apache, Google and some other projects is another way to improve your programming skill and become a better programmer. Just signing there mailing list and following discussion teaches you a lot. Since most of discussions happens between good programmers, by listening them and understanding problem and their approach, solution and view, automatically develop good programming habits on you. To get most of it, do not just sit passive, ask questions, offer your view, but same time value others as well.


4) Practicing data structure, Algorithms and Design related problems
I was thinking to put that as second item, but it ended up fourth. In my opinion this is the most critical of things to do to become a better programmer. Most of good programmers I have seen and met are really good in data structures, algorithms and basics. By learning these things, you take better advantage of what is available. Since data structure is key piece of any program, solid knowledge of them helps during problem solving. Similarly knowledge of key programming principles, search and sort algorithms and other well know algorithms develop programming skills on you.


5) Reading Good Blogs
Reading good blogs is a small part of reading books. How does reading blogs helps you to become better programmer? Well it does. Since blogs are often written by programmer themselves and most of them share there personal view, experience, you often find them relevant. Also blogs  are small  piece of information so it digests well. Blog also help to learn new technology and new features of existing language and API. Many times, I have seen something subtle, or missed things from a really well known part of Java described in a small blog post.


6) Reading Code
If reading blogs helps to become good programmer, than reading code help more than that, but same time reading blog is easy but reading code is tough. Do you see resistance? then you should do it. Look code of open source projects, your fellow programmers code, your existing proprietary code, code from Java SDK and try to understand how they work, try to see what they are doing and why they are doing. Find patterns, develop navigation skill, initially you will find it boring and difficult, but with time you will develop a good code sense, which will alert you when you do mistake, help you to spot others mistake, gaps and code smell. This Code sense is one of the sign of better programmer, they often tend to look, what you missed.


7) Writing Unit test
Unit test complement thinking and coding process, and subsequently helps you to design better. Anything which is difficult to test has chance of improvement. Also writing unit test helps a lot in finding better names, better abstraction, better interface and abstract class design and overall improves code quality. But like coding and designing, unit testing is also tough job for average programmers, you will see lot of resistance there. Some programmer writes trivial test, instead of thinking hard on usage scenario. Remember there is no substitute of think through process, after analysis, design and development, unit testing is another opportunity to think through scenarios and gaps in your code. Make it a rule, always write Unit test for your code.


8) Doing Code review
Like Unit testing, Code review is another thing which help to become a good solid programmer. Code review help both reviewer and author, reviewer improves his code sense and offer genuine advice, while author learn from his mistakes. It often helps that the code you think is rock solid, has some bugs which only other programmer can see, Code review and four eye check does that for you. If you are lucky and get a chance to work in a company which has unit testing, code review as discipline then you are likely to be  better programmer than rest. These two things immensely help to improve programming skill.

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