5 Tips to Improve Your Programming Skill
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.— Martin Fowler
Past 15 years ago, I know very little about programming. I started to explore web programming language such as HTML, CSS and very little of JavaScript.
During that time, I rely on some limited article, training module and also from book to improve my skill.
In this current article, I would share some learning from my past experience in joining iPrice Group as Software Engineer. It is like a compilation of how I improve my programming as a software engineer that I learned from my senior at iPrice.
Let’s jump into five of them
Read The Book
There are a lot of website that offers you the article about learning how to code or how to troubleshoot on something.
Website like stackoverflow.com is the first source that where developer go whenever they have issue with their code. Sometimes we also go to documentation website of the framework to dig deeper about some of functionality.
But, book can give you better understand about the fundamental of Software Engineer and best practice.
Book like “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin and “Refactoring” by martin Fowler for example. It gives good explanation how should be a software engineer code their program.
Reading book also helping us as developer strength our conceptual thinking and also absorb the knowledge from more experience people that has been in software development industry for years.
Code Surfing
One of our senior architect once told me, “If you have some free time, try to do a code surfing”.
This term is something new for me, I question my self what is this code surfing.
Code surfing is an activity that you just read the code and explore what is the code doing and how is the code has been written.
This practice help us as developer to learn from the existing code, which one is good code that easy to read, and which one is bad code that make a headache to read it.
By doing this, we do self learning for ourselves to understand about how is the good code being implemented.
Pair Programming
Pair programming is a practice that origin from the Extreme Programming (XP).
The idea behind this practice is that two brains and four eyes are better than one brain and two eyes.
In pair programming two developers sitting down together in front of computer to work together to solve the same problem.
The best way to pair program is to just sit side by side in front of the monitor. Slide the key board and mouse back and forth. Both programmers concentrate on the code being written. — extremeprogramming.org
Benefit of doing this are:
- Speed up the learning process when each other coding and reviewing the code that being written
- Building better relationship between you and the team member
- Improve the interpersonal skills of of you to understand about other people opinion.
Code Review or Peer Review
Code review or Peer Code Review is a practice to review of someone Pull Request (PR) if contains any mistake or make sure the code has good quality.
This one is another step of the quality assurance in the software development ecosystem.
By doing this practice, we can capture if there is any mistake or flaws that being written by a developer.
On other side, for the developer who works on the PR can learn from the feedback of the reviewer and improve the programming skills.
For example, the common mistake is the naming standard. Sometimes we use noun for function name, and sometimes we make the name of the variable too short or not meaningful.
So, by getting your code reviewed by someone, you can get better and better in the next of your PR.
Practice, Practice, & Practice
People believe practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t. If you’re making a tremendous amount of mistakes, all you’re doing is deeply ingraining the same mistakes. — Jillian Michaels
I would agree with the quote above. By practicing our programming skills through freelance project, open source project, personal project, or some of programming website. It doesn’t guarantee you become perfect.
What makes you perfect is learning from the mistake that have you made from one project to another. And not to do the same mistake like before.
Hey, I am new developer? How can I practice my programming skills?
Even if you are a new developer who just started your programming step, there are a lot of website that can offer some learning for you.
Please find the list below
- hackerrank — A website to practice your algorithm logic
- Freecodecamp.org — provide some tutorials to learn programming by directly involved in the code
- CodeChef
- udemy.com
The rest, you can try to do your own project or build your own tools to practice.
That’s most likely that I can share base on my experience.
Do you have any idea how to improve the programming skills, kindly drop your comment.
