As everything in life there must be a balance. If you only focus on writing code solo at work, never reflect, never practice, never interact with other people or study their work, you are not going to make it only by yourself.
I dont think money is a problem because most conference talks are free on the web and there are loads and loads of content about any topic. Time is a huge problem. I don't have a family, so I can spend lots of my free time honeying my skills and I still feel that I'm going slow. The skill here is learning how to improve. Learning new languages, reading books, reading other peoples code, practicing katas, being part of communities, doing coding dojos, pair programming, becoming someone's mentor or mentee, teaching, etc... are all ways to improve and to find your weakest spots. Uncle Bob also says that you need to put, apart from the normal 40h of work, 20h hours to improve. How you use them is up to you but I found out that diversifying a bit and keeping some that I hardly change has worked well for me. If people are sceptical about doing katas, I would, as I do with any new thing, give it a proper spin for 3 weeks and see what I get out of it. On 13 August 2010 08:57, Wildam Martin <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 09:39, Mario Fusco <[email protected]> wrote: > > Now I know a > > new technique and I have enriched my programmer's toolbox with another > > item. Can you obtain some similar benefits by repeating the same > > exercise again and again? > > Only from rushing over the topic, but this is again similar to the > language discussions: Yes, you can learn from new languages, from new > techniques, from talking to different people, from going to courses, > from hanging around in the park philosophying about your coding > practices and from doing that alltogether (putting parts of all that > in the - mental or material - recycle bin) again and again. > > But seriously: Who has the time and money for that? The more I am > trying to learn the less I feel to get things done. > > Lately I tend to sympathize with Carl - focus on writing code. > > For the rewrite: I would do that only if the old piece really sucks. > -- > Martin Wildam > > http://www.google.com/profiles/mwildam > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Java Posse" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<javaposse%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
