Continuous-improvement

I've been going through some of my old code from college lately and I've been surprised by just how little I knew early on, even during my senior year. It made me think about the sorts of things that new programmers don't (usually) learn or that are learned best from mentors as opposed to from books or classes. In this post, I want to share concrete things that _I've learned_. No calling out other people here, this is all me.

I discovered "my year in books" a few weeks back and found it pretty interesting. The idea is that you plug in your Goodreads profile link and it will generate a nice view of the various books you've read over the past year.

It's a holiday break, my four year old is taking a nap, so I'm writing up a post on 2023. I'm also letting AI proofread. Here goes!

RSS - Really Simple Syndication. It's been a staple of my learning since the early 2000s, even before Google Reader. I was an early user of RSS Bandit before I moved to Google Reader. After Google Reader was shut down, I moved to Feedly and then, recently, to Newsblur. For most of the last 10 years, I've been a user of Reeder. I love RSS.

I'm on a mission to write more... again. I keep feeling like I shouldn't share something because the information is out there, but that's a lame excuse. So here goes.

Last week, prior to a weekly meeting, one of my team members had the idea to take a few minutes before the meeting to review some code. We already do code reviews prior to deployments, but we've been wanting to improve the quality of the code reviews... we wanted to really have good dialog about code quality and be able to share that discussion with the whole team.

In my post looking forward to 2008, I mentioned that I wanted to take more time this year to learn new technologies, particularly outside of the Microsoft communities. With all of the push in .NET towards dynamic languages right now, why not look to some of the dynamic languages that have been out there being used for years?

Be proud of your code, even if you wrote it the wrong way... consider it a learning experience.

Reflecting on posts from the ALT.NET conference

Thoughts on mistakes, sunk costs, and learning

In a phrase, don't stop learning.