Three broad areas that you could focus on to improve your career as a
developer. Code is the most important, because this is the basic skill for a developer. But the other two, which we named Community and Think Differently, can’t be left behind. They are the things that will help you break
through the boundaries of your career. Spending some weekly practice time in those three areas will help you become a better developer. It will make
you a more complete professional, and enable you to go after new opportunities.
All this helps you boost your career and find new paths. And the suggestions we present here are not hard things to do, nor time consuming.You can squeeze them into your busy day.Code: Open Source Software We have already seen that to be good at coding, you must practice a lot. But even with practice, how do you know if you’re writing good code or bad code? We still have not
reached the point of having a practical and noncontroversial way of measuring code quality. Code quality is still most of the time a qualitative,
rather than quantitative, subject. You can’t say for sure if your code is good, but you can always recognize better or worse code. To make sure
you’re on the right path to becoming a better developer, your best bet is to assess your progress against other developers’ code. In the software world, the way to watch others perform is by looking at their software,
and the source code they wrote. That allows us to study it, experiment with it, and even improve it. But for that,we need access to the source code of great developers. This is the beauty of open source: It’s freely available
for you to study and compare with your own code. You can find a huge variety of different projects on GitHub and Bitbucket, ranging from small to enterprise-level projects. You can learn new techniques, and you can explore different points of view. You can be awed by great code and learn what not to do from developers who are not accomplished. Want to explore different ways of testing code? Dig into open source projects and see how other developers do it. Don’t know the proper way of doing logging
in your systems? Get an open source project you use that provides great logging information and learn to do it the same way. Contributing to open source enables you to practice some skills that maybe you don’t (or can’t) use in your daily work. Many of us are limited at work to creating traditional
enterprise systems with create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) features. But in our spare time, we can choose any open source project that sparks our interest to learn or contribute to. Sometimes even at work, we can take a
relevant open source tool or library and fix a bug or implement a new feature. It certainly is exciting, and it helps us to think outside the box.
developer. Code is the most important, because this is the basic skill for a developer. But the other two, which we named Community and Think Differently, can’t be left behind. They are the things that will help you break
through the boundaries of your career. Spending some weekly practice time in those three areas will help you become a better developer. It will make
you a more complete professional, and enable you to go after new opportunities.
All this helps you boost your career and find new paths. And the suggestions we present here are not hard things to do, nor time consuming.You can squeeze them into your busy day.Code: Open Source Software We have already seen that to be good at coding, you must practice a lot. But even with practice, how do you know if you’re writing good code or bad code? We still have not
reached the point of having a practical and noncontroversial way of measuring code quality. Code quality is still most of the time a qualitative,
rather than quantitative, subject. You can’t say for sure if your code is good, but you can always recognize better or worse code. To make sure
you’re on the right path to becoming a better developer, your best bet is to assess your progress against other developers’ code. In the software world, the way to watch others perform is by looking at their software,
and the source code they wrote. That allows us to study it, experiment with it, and even improve it. But for that,we need access to the source code of great developers. This is the beauty of open source: It’s freely available
for you to study and compare with your own code. You can find a huge variety of different projects on GitHub and Bitbucket, ranging from small to enterprise-level projects. You can learn new techniques, and you can explore different points of view. You can be awed by great code and learn what not to do from developers who are not accomplished. Want to explore different ways of testing code? Dig into open source projects and see how other developers do it. Don’t know the proper way of doing logging
in your systems? Get an open source project you use that provides great logging information and learn to do it the same way. Contributing to open source enables you to practice some skills that maybe you don’t (or can’t) use in your daily work. Many of us are limited at work to creating traditional
enterprise systems with create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) features. But in our spare time, we can choose any open source project that sparks our interest to learn or contribute to. Sometimes even at work, we can take a
relevant open source tool or library and fix a bug or implement a new feature. It certainly is exciting, and it helps us to think outside the box.
