How to Become a Better Programmer – Use a Skill-Building Planner
The demand for skilled programmers has never been higher. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of software developers is projected to grow 22% from 2019 to 2029, much faster than the average for all occupations. This translates to more than 316,000 new programming jobs to be filled, in addition to the existing 1.4 million positions.
| Occupation | Employment in 2019 | Projected Employment in 2029 | Percent Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software Developers | 1,469,200 | 1,785,200 | 22% |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
To take advantage of these abundant opportunities, programmers must commit to continuously sharpening their skills. However, the path to mastering programming is long and arduous. Research by Prof. Anders Ericsson, the foremost expert on expertise, suggests that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve top-level performance in cognitively demanding fields.
| Level of Proficiency | Number of Hours of Deliberate Practice |
|---|---|
| Beginner | 0-100 hours |
| Intermediate | 100-1,000 hours |
| Advanced | 1,000-5,000 hours |
| Expert | 5,000-10,000 hours |
Source: Prof. Anders Ericsson, Florida State University
Deliberate practice refers to focused, goal-directed practice that pushes you outside your comfort zone. It involves taking on challenges just beyond your current ability, and receiving continuous feedback on your performance. This repeated stretching of your skillset is what triggers your brain to rewire itself and build new neural pathways, a process known as neuroplasticity.
As a full-stack developer who has transitioned from novice to expert, I‘ve experienced firsthand the transformative power of deliberate practice. With each new language, framework and tool I set out to learn, I rely on a systematic approach to skill-building to accelerate my growth. The foundation of this approach is a skill-building planner.
Why Use a Skill-Building Planner
A skill-building planner is a tool for organizing and optimizing the way you practice programming. By planning out in advance the specific skills you want to develop and the projects you‘ll complete to cement your understanding, you‘re able to learn much more efficiently and effectively.
This proactive approach provides several major benefits:
1. Provides direction and focus
When first learning to code, it‘s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things to learn. There are hundreds of languages, frameworks, tools and concepts. Without a clear roadmap, you can easily spend months drifting through tutorials and toy problems without making meaningful progress.
A skill-building planner solves this by forcing you to think carefully about your goals and chart the most direct path to achieve them. By setting a clear intention for each day and week, you‘re able to stay locked in on the highest-leverage learning activities.
2. Makes progress tangible
Programmer skill development is largely invisible – it‘s difficult to measure things like algorithmic thinking ability or code organization. Not seeing concrete evidence of improvement is demotivating and makes it harder to persist through the frustrating parts.
Keeping a record of your daily practice and achievements makes progress more visible and quantifiable. Seeing the list of concepts you‘ve mastered and projects you‘ve completed is a powerful motivator. This feedback fuels a virtuous cycle of effort and improvement.
3. Enables reflection and iteration
Programming skill isn‘t built linearly, but rather through a process of experimentation, feedback and reflection. A planner provides a structured way to analyze your performance and extract key lessons.
After each practice session, you reflect on what went well, where you struggled, and what you‘ll adjust going forward. This heightened self-awareness accelerates your ability to learn from mistakes and refine your problem-solving approach. Your planner becomes a personalized guide for optimizing your learning.
4. Combats imposter syndrome
Many developers fall victim to imposter syndrome, the crippling belief that you‘re not good enough and that you‘ll be exposed as a fraud. This often stems from unhealthy comparisons to other programmers who appear to be progressing faster.
Reviewing your skill-building planner is the perfect antidote. It shifts your attention away from others and back to your own growth. Flipping through the hundreds of hours of practice and stacks of projects you‘ve logged proves in undeniable terms that you are in fact making major strides.
5. Develops meta-learning abilities
Aside from acquiring concrete programming knowledge, using a planner also trains your general learning ability. You gradually uncover the learning resources, environmental variables and productivity techniques that enable you to pick up new skills faster.
This understanding of your personal learning patterns pays dividends well beyond programming. With enough entries, your planner becomes a user manual for how to master any new skill you set your mind to.
Strategies for Effective Skill-Building
Convinced of the importance of tracking your practice? Here are some key strategies to weave into your skill-building planner:
1. Set clear goals and create a roadmap
Every great endeavor starts with a clear goal in mind. Define exactly what you hope to achieve with your programming abilities. Perhaps it‘s building a specific project, landing a developer job, or advancing your current career.
Crystallize your goal in as much detail as possible and capture it in your planner. Then, unpack the specific competencies and skills you‘ll need to develop to reach that goal. This list becomes your learning roadmap. Break it down further into monthly and weekly targets to make it actionable.
2. Emphasize active practice
It‘s tempting to spend all your time absorbed in tutorials and books. But real skill development comes from putting fingers to keyboard and writing code. Ensure your planner emphasizes active practice over passive learning.
For each new concept you‘re studying, plan out a concrete project to apply it. Implement user authentication for a webapp to cement your session management abilities. Visualize a complex data set to master data manipulation techniques. Tackle algorithm challenges on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank. The more you practice recalls, the stronger your skills become.
3. Leverage spaced repetition
One of the biggest challenges when learning to code is the sheer volume of syntax and concepts to remember. Cramming doesn‘t work. Information is quickly forgotten if not reinforced regularly.
The solution is spaced repetition – a learning technique where information is reviewed at increasing intervals until committed to long-term memory. Use your planner to schedule frequent revisits of core concepts you want to cement. Create flashcards for language syntax, data structures, design patterns. Review them daily at first, then every few days, then weekly. Over time, they‘ll be thoroughly encoded in your brain, ready to be recalled at will.
4. Learn by teaching
A powerful way to boost your own programming abilities is to teach others. Distilling a complex topic into an easy-to-understand form forces you to fill in any gaps in your own understanding and think through the concept from new angles.
Look for opportunities to share what you‘re learning. Write a tutorial blog post walking through a tricky concept you just figured out. Record videos of yourself live coding a project. Deliver a conference talk on an interesting new library or technique. The insights you uncover while teaching will level up your own knowledge.
5. Immerse in the community
Trying to learn programming on your own is lonely and demotivating. Connection with others is crucial for maintaining momentum through the ups and downs. Make a point to surround yourself with like-minded programmers who can support and challenge you.
Join a local meetup group to learn alongside others. Contribute to an open source project to practice collaboration and absorb best practices. Ask and answer questions on StackOverflow or Reddit. Attend conferences (or watch the recorded talks) to learn from top experts. Building these relationships will expand your knowledge and sustain you through the hard parts.
6. Push beyond your comfort zone
It‘s easy to fall into the trap of practicing only what you‘re already good at. But real growth comes from tackling problems at the edge of your ability, where you‘re guaranteed to struggle and make mistakes.
Each practice session, pick a challenge that intimidates you. Go beyond the canned examples and take on a project with requirements you‘re not quite sure how to implement. Dive deep into a gnarly debugging issue. Embrace the discomfort – the more you practice operating outside your safe zone, the faster your skills will advance.
7. Reflect and refine your approach
The only way to improve your programming ability is to critically analyze your own performance and extract lessons. After each practice session, conduct a debrief in your planner:
- What did you do well? What did you struggle with?
- What knowledge gaps did you uncover? How will you fill them?
- What techniques worked? What could you have done more efficiently?
This regular reflection creates a tight feedback loop. You‘re able to spot patterns in your performance and implement optimizations rapidly. The quicker you‘re able to learn from mistakes, the faster you‘ll become a highly proficient programmer.
Sample Skill-Building Plan
To illustrate these concepts, here‘s what an effective daily skill-building plan might look like for an aspiring web developer:
June 23, 2021
Goal: Master React Hooks API
Sub-skills:
- [ ] Understand the useState hook
- [ ] Implement the useEffect hook
- [ ] Manage state with the useContext hook
- [ ] Create a custom hook
Learning Resources:
- Official React Hooks documentation
- "React Hooks in Action" by John Larsen
- Egghead.io course: "Shareable Custom Hooks in React"
Practice Project: Build a movie search app using the OMDB API that allows users to save their favorite films
Post-Project Reflection:
- Hooks made state management much cleaner compared to class components
- Figuring out the dependency array for useEffect was tricky – need to better understand when values should be included
- Creating custom hooks was intimidating at first, but really powerful for sharing logic
- Need to practice using hooks more to cement the concepts, still fuzzy on some of the rules
Time Spent:
- Tutorial/Exercises: 2 hours
- Project Implementation: 3 hours
- Reflection: 30 minutes
Tomorrow‘s Objective: Refactor movie app to use the useReducer hook for more complex state management
Make Skill-Building a Habit
The power of a skill-building planner comes from using it consistently. Commit to spending a few minutes at the end of each day planning your practice for the next day. Note what you‘ll study, what you‘ll build, and what you hope to achieve.
Before diving in the next day, revisit your objectives to calibrate your focus. Afterwards, take time to reflect on your performance and capture any lessons or optimizations.
To magnify the impact, share your plan with an accountability buddy and report back to each other on your progress. Or take it a step further and live-stream your practice sessions to place a healthy pressure on yourself to perform.
If you‘d like a pre-built template to kickstart your skill-building habit, check out Daily Skill Planner. It‘s a ready-made system for setting goals, tracking your practice, and accelerating your growth – built by programmers, for programmers.
Remember, becoming a masterful programmer is not about haphazard practice, but rather deliberate, structured skill-building. Let your planner be the roadmap to guide your daily efforts, and there‘s no limit to how far you can go.