There are many ways for programmers to learn and improve, such as:
- Making side projects
- Reading news articles and blog posts
- Reading other people's code
- Playing with other people's code
- Writing tutorials or demos about code we've written
- Using intelligence-sucking devices to steal IQ points
- Taking notes to better remember the important info we find
I've been a big fan of methods around research and notes. It's worked for a long time. Lately, it hasn't been working as well. My motivation and inspiration are drying up, and my anxiety and impatience are building up in their place.
My guess is I'd been catching up to the code I'd been writing but not researching. Now I'm just about caught up and unsure what to do next. If that's the case, the answer is blending some code projects and experimentation into my writing. A possible flow for this could be:
- Take a small code project or demo, either related to my job or something else entirely. Make sure it's outside my comfort zone in some way.
- Try my hand at coding it and solving the puzzles the project carries, while documenting how it goes.
- Once it's done, take my notes and write them up into one or more posts.
- Share the posts with the final project as a live demo or reference.
As always, I can't predict if that'll work for me. Also as always, I need to try.