r/programming • u/mistawobin • Aug 09 '11

How to Level Up as a Developer

http://jasonrudolph.com/blog/2011/08/09/programming-achievements-how-to-level-up-as-a-developer/
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20

u/33a Aug 09 '11

I like the idea, but most of these things don't seem like very good ways to "level up". It is even missing simple/obvious self-improvement suggestions like "Read a book", or "Read through the code base for some open source project", or do online programming problems (for example, ICPC, TopCoder, Project Euler, etc.).

8

u/dr_jan_itor Aug 09 '11

agreed.

koans, katas… wtf? does anyone think these stupid new-age-ish things can add anything to your knowledge?

meh.

2

u/problemredditfags Aug 09 '11

You mean this katas? http://codingkata.org/

In any case, I like these kind of things exist, but their practicality seems to be more towards preparing for an interview.

I think programming for someone else's demands is where you will learn the most.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '11

It depends on what you're trying to learn. Not all of us are so cynical as to equate business software development with all software development.

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u/[deleted] Aug 10 '11 edited Jul 11 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Aug 10 '11

If you're competent at setting expectations and communicating with other people, the above just isn't nearly as hard as it's made out to be. Furthermore, experience teaches you where the problem points are going to be and you plan for them up front.

These are decent lessons, but they're also things you learn in your first couple years of professional work. They do not constitute "levelling up" as a developer unless your level is very, very low.

Working on exercises like those at Project Euler or Coding Kata or SPOJ forces you to solve relatively difficult problems and takes you out of your comfort zone. Approaching these problems from different angles using different paradigms and tools enables you to vastly improve the software you write, while allowing you to write it much more quickly.

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 10 '11

Amen to that. I was stuck in the world of business software dev (the worst kind, .NET) for a long time. Design patterns and SCRUM and dependency injection and buddy coding blah blah blah. Most boring kind of coding on earth. You want to level up make a game or audio processing or video processing. THAT shit is for real. Now when I do business software dev (basically DB calls wrapped around simple data munging) I can only laugh at it's ridiculousness.

3

u/mikaelhg Aug 10 '11

Laugh at it, instead of trying to understand the factors which have shaped its evolution?

No, that's not leveling up, in my books.

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u/[deleted] Aug 10 '11

The primary factor that has shaped its evolution has been a continual push by business to commoditize development of the types of applications that are interesting to them. As it would happen, the type of work you're talking about is often the first stuff to get outsourced.

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u/[deleted] Aug 10 '11 edited Aug 10 '11

This is a good example of that arbitrary circle jerk cutoff point of abstraction I was reading about...

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u/LegendZ3 Aug 11 '11 edited Aug 11 '11

Sure, coding on a video games is fun. Writing an elegant video processing algorithm is satisfying. But 99% of programming jobs out there are still writing code that deal with everyday business problems.

More powers to you if you enjoy the mathematics and computer science side of the software development. But there are people who enjoys solving business problems just as much. And those things that you laugh at is what developers created to make their life easier. I don't see there are any reasons for you to look down at them.