The best place to practice your programming skills

If you want to be a better programmer, what is the best way to practice and improve your skills? You can improve your skills by working on a side project, but what if you don’t have the free time or motivation? You can learn from a mentor or more experienced programmers, but what if you don’t work with any?

There is one more way you can practice skills, and in many ways it’s the ideal way. It doesn’t require extra time, or experienced colleagues: all it takes is a job as a software engineer. The best way to improve your skills is by practicing them on the job.

Now, when you see the word “skills” you might immediately translate that into “tools and technologies”. And learning new technologies on the job is not always possible, especially when your company is stuck on one particular tech stack. But your goal as a programmer isn’t to use technologies.

Your goal is to solve problems, and writing software is a technique that helps you do that. You job might be helping people plan their travel, or helping a business sell more products, or entertaining people. These goals might require technology, but the technology is a means not an end. So while understanding particular technologies is both useful and necessary, it is just the start of the skills you need as a programmer.

The skills you need

Many of the most important skills you need as a programmer have nothing to do with the particulars of any technology, and everything to do with learning how to better identify and solve problems.

Here are some of the skills that will help you identify problems:

• Business goals: you choose what problems to focus on based on your organization’s goals.
• Root cause analysis: when a problem is presented you don’t just accept it, but rather dig in and try to figure out the underlying problem.
• Identifying development bottlenecks: you notice when software development is slowing down and try to figure out why.

And some of the skills you’ll need to solve problems once they’re found:

• Self-management: you can organize your own time while working on a particular solution. You stay focused and on task, and if things are taking you too long you’ll notice and ask for help.
• Planning your own software project: given a problem statement and a high-level solution, you can break up the task into the necessary steps to implement that solution. You can then take those steps and figure out the best order in which to implement them.
• Debugging: when faced with a bug you don’t understand you are able to figure out what is causing it, or at least how to work around it.

These are just some of the skills you can practice and improve during your normal workday. And while there are ways your organization can help your learning—like using newer technologies, or having expert coworkers—you can practice these particular skills almost anywhere.

The best practice is the real thing

Every time you solve a problem at work you are also practicing identifying and solving problems, and practicing under the most realistic of situations. It’s a real problem, you have limited resources, and there’s a deadline.

Compare this to working on a side project. With a side project you have come up with the goal on your own, and there’s no real deadline. It’s possible to make side projects more realistic, but it’s never quite the same as practicing the real thing.

Here’s how to practice your skills at work:

1. Pick a particular skill you want to work on.
2. Pay attention to how you apply it: when do you use this skill? Are you conscious of when it’s necessary and how you’re applying it? Even just realizing something is a skill and then paying attention to how and when you use it can help you improve it.
3. Figure out ways to measure the skill’s impact, and work on improving the way you apply it. With debugging, for example, you can see how long it takes you to discover a problem. Then notice what particular techniques and questions speed up your debugging, and make sure you apply them consistently.
4. Learn from your colleagues. Even if they’re no more experienced than you, they still have different experiences, and might have skills and knowledge you don’t.
5. Try to notice the mistakes you make, and the cues and models that would have helped you avoid a particular mistake. This is what I do in my weekly newsletter where I share my own mistakes and what I’ve learned from them.
6. If possible, find a book on the topic and skim it. You can skim a book in just an hour or two and come away with some vague models and ideas for improvement. As you do your job and notice yourself applying the skill those models will come to mind. You can then read a small, focused, and relevant part of the book in detail at just the right moment: when you need to apply the skill.

Practicing on the job

Your job is always the best place to practice your skills, because that is where you will apply your skills. The ideal, of course, is to find a job that lets you try new technologies and learn from experienced colleagues. But even if your job doesn’t achieve that ideal, there are many critical skills that you can practice at almost any job. Don’t waste your time at work: every workday can also be a day where you are learning.