I published my first article on Medium about a developer habit I started one year ago. To improve my personal development skills, I dedicated at least 30 minutes every day to code and learn something new. Looking back after 365 days, I can totally recommend it to everyone to take time out of the usual schedule to improve your skills.
Developer Habit: Committing code to GitHub for 365 consecutive days
My main motivation to start working on my skills every day was inspired by the following quote:
Professionals practice.
True professionals work hard to keep their skills sharp and ready. It is not enough to simply do your daily job and call that practice.
Doing your daily job is performance, not practice.
Practice is when you specifically exercise your skills outside of the performance of your job for the sole purpose of refining and enhancing those skills.
(The Clean Code, Page 19)
For a visual representation of my streak, I used the GitHub contribution view. This visual factor was really important as it helps to establish and proceed with a new habit, as you don’t want to lose your track.
TL;DR for all impatient readers:
- Do it in themorning hours, you might be tired after work and you’ll start your day with an already achieved task
- Findinteresting andchallenging tasks to work on e.g. use online tutorials (Udemy, YouTube …) and code with the instructor in parallel
- Stick to your decision and trackwhat you’ve already achieved
- Learn something new to become a generalist with one or more specialists (a better term for full-stack these days)
- Have fun while doing it otherwise it will be hard to stick to it
Read the full article here.
Have fun establishing your developer habits,
Phil