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Back to Square One

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I recently published a website that was built with technologies I was unfamiliar with. I accomplished my goals for the side-project and I learned a lot about those new techs. Yay!

However…

I didn’t feel good about the quality of my work. I took lazy short-cuts and found “creative” workarounds which ran counter to the spirit of the technologies I was supposedly trying to learn. I knew this was a problem from the start, because I’ve been down this road many times before and I recognized that I had conflicting motivations.

I wanted to learn the new techs, but I also wanted to ship before the end of the holiday season. The deadline was self-imposed, sure, but I thought it was important because the vast majority of my attempted side-projects wither up and die long before making it to the mausoleum.

What’s a dev to do?

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Deliberate Practice for Programmers

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The Coding Blocks podcast has always been about trying to figure out how we can be better programmers.

I was fascinated by the book Outliers a few years ago, and it is quite controversial now though I think the premise is solid: Extraordinary skills require a winning combination of opportunity AND hard work.

I’ve been on a quest to create and foster these two things ever since!
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4 reasons why the “10x Developer” is so controversial

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The notion of the “10x Developer” stems from an infamous study that measured and compared the productivity of programmers. The study found that although the programmers had roughly the same amount of experience, (7 years) some programmers were far more productive than others.

In fact, the best programmers averaged more than 10 times the productivity of the worst. Hence, 10x. (note: I said average, debugging time was a ratio of 20:1!)

These radical results have been a source of debate ever since.

I’m very interested in assessing and improving my own skills so I took a deeper look to see what exactly was so hot about this topic.

It boils down to these 4 things:
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Be Careful with your Side Projects!

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I recently wrote about the differences between programming knowledge and skill in a previous post. In short: knowledge is what you understand, and skill is what you can do with it.

The internet is chock full of amazing information for just about anything you might want to learn. Things like videos, e-books, and getting started guides.

However, it is not enough to “know” a programming language, you need to be able to make cool stuff with it. Knowing is only half the battle!

So…what advice does the software engineering industry have for programmers who want to advance their skills?
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Knowledge vs Skill

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What does it mean to be good at something?

Knowledge is understanding of a subject, skill is your proficiency in the application of that knowledge. By definition, you can’t be skilled at something you don’t understand. But knowledge on its own is only half the battle.
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