Ways to advance your programming skills and improve as a developer

hi I'm Adam Culp and you're at beach cast today I'm gonna share ways to advance your programming skills and how you can improve as a developer so stick around and we'll get right on that [Music] welcome back if you want to grow as a developer and learn how to make better web applications start now by subscribing to Beach cast and make sure to click the bell notification so you won't miss anything and if you found this video helpful or if you have a question please leave a comment down below and please make sure to LIKE the video by clicking the thumbs up button thank you some of the questions I'm asked most often by other people is how can I advance as a developer how can I learn how to be a better programmer what do i what do you think I should do to advance my skills and be able to get a job a full-time job as a programmer so I've got some ideas behind this now these aren't rocket science is not earth earth shattering discoveries but rather these are things that I've found that helped me to improve my programming skills and help me do better as a web developer so the first item is that I have to keep things interesting I have a very tough time staying focused on things I have a very difficult time keeping myself in to whatever tasks I'm currently doing so I find that keeping it interesting is very important now I have a couple ways of doing that generally in our day-to-day tasks we tend to be doing things that are pretty routine right they're the same thing all the time maybe we're working for a certain company and the products that we're working on are the same products for you know days months or even years and it's very hard to stay interested and stay focused on that so what I've found that helps me is to do some side projects maybe maybe for money maybe for not maybe I typically don't do side contracts because side contracts means that it's it's a more full time it's something that's a little bit more formal so I tend to shy away from doing contracts only because as of late I've had a full-time employer most NDA's with companies and most contracts that you have with your full-time employers state that you can't really do that but you can do like aside little projects and and maybe some of them are making money but it's not a contractual right and it's just something where hey I'm gonna perform some tasks for you or build some small little proof-of-concept for you and in return you know I make some sort of fee for them another thing I find that works really well is to cut down on distractions so try to keep your like your Twitter feed your Facebook other social media try not to keep those open open them check your messages every once in awhile but then turn around and shut them back down again so that way they're not they're not pulling your attention away from what you're doing some of the biggest distractions are having extra things open now since I use Linux as my primary operating system for my development environments generally what I'll do is I have multiple workspaces and I can switch back and forth from one workspace to another what I can do then is I can have my social media or things that drain my attention off on another workspace so they're not right in my face but yet they are there so that I can swap over really quick when I need to check something or want to check something but yet they're not distracting from what I'm actually working on and I find that that helps a great deal another thing that I find that helps me keep my current project interesting is by keeping track of my yak shaving in technology we have a term that is called yak shaving and that is where rather than actually performing a given task or rather than doing a certain activity we tend to do other side activities that distract us from that you know maybe if I'm if it's company if it's time for me to do some programming maybe I'll go and read some some blog post or watch some videos that might be related or I might be doing something like if I have to migrate an epic from one place to another maybe I spend way too much time doing DevOps and to get everything up and working and I don't really need to spend that much time on DevOps but I do and therefore it's more of a distraction and we call that yak shaving because you're spending all this time shaving the yak versus doing what you're actually supposed to be doing so those are some of the things that I do to help keep things interesting for me so I stay on task because it's very easy to get distracted from that another thing that I find really helpful for me to learn and grow as a developer is by creating documentation maybe a you know maybe I'm working on something there are many open-source projects out there that would welcome somebody to help them create documentation for whatever it is that that they're doing so I have yet to find any open source project that would you know tell you know please don't help us document this if you're doing some project if you're working with some open source library and you find that you struggle to get past something you know and then once you work your way through it and you're like ah if the documentation had told me there's one little thing it would have been so much easier why not add that to the documentation issue a pull request it does two different things one is it keeps you from from losing interest in what you're doing because you're working in something that you are already going to help you know already doing and it helps the next people that come along so that they'll have that extra little bit of documentation so that they don't run into the same problems that you did and of course it helps you by submit by contributing to open source that's brand building it's personal brand building so that way you can point to a given repo and say I contributed to this open source project and I did it through documentation or through code whatever the case might be another thing that I find that really helps me with my with my skills as a developer is by reading the documentation to begin with many times we'll we'll go out and we'll find some library or something that does what we need it to do and then we spend a lot of a wasted time trying to figure out how to utilize it where if we had looked at the documentation even briefly we might have been able to create shortcuts to get things done versus having to slog our way through it now I'll be the first to admit when I'm when I'm working with something I find it very challenging I find it somewhat rewarding to hack on something until I figure it out but on your day to day job or in projects I've come to find out that it's a lot more beneficial if you just read the documentation really quickly there are still things that you'll have to hack on there are still things that you have to figure out but that will become a little bit less and you'll find that your programming becomes a lot more enjoyable because you spend less time trying to troubleshoot an issue that really wasn't an issue to begin with you were just using it incorrectly one of the things that I find really helps me is by watching additional videos reading blog posts doing things like that maybe even watching episodes of beach cast now not for me because I'm creating the episodes of beach cast but for you often times I find that although I tend to learn more by actually doing so by solving problems and doing the code I find that I learn a lot more that way one thing I do find is that watching videos tends to kind of break the ice for me how I think Beach casts help people most of all is that it gives them something to watch in their spare time or maybe they follow along in the code and they they are able to see how something might be done so that way when it comes time for them to actually try to program these solutions or try to use these libraries or things along that line then hopefully they think back to that beach cast episode and they're like ah I remember Adam did this on beach cast and then it's not so much of a shock or maybe you have some way to overcome a hurdle that you might have run into so again videos are so great for that because it allows you in your spare time oftentimes what I'm doing is I'll be sitting in a doctor's office or in a waiting line or something like that and I'll watch a video on something that I know I'm going to be trying to tackle eventually and then when it comes time I'm reading the documentation and actually trying to use the library or perform some tasks I always think back to the video as well and it just gives me another point of reference and makes things go a little bit easier as I go along so videos can really be helpful for that there's a lot of different resources for that free code camp has a lot of good videos there's also treehouse bounnam a LinkedIn learning you said they used to be lynda.com and those cost a little bit of money but they are still good resources and they're not really expensive to be able to pick up on some of these technologies maybe you want to look at something like Codecademy and again beach cast you can watch more beach cast episodes as I'm recording them to help you learn new things and let's not forget community involvement so in being involved in a community whether that's the PHP community that laravel community or any other community out there maybe the JavaScript community and there's various communities around that there's a wordpress community a Drupal a Joomla you know a lot of different communities out there I encourage you to to to contribute to those be a part of them if you have a local user group in whatever technology or whatever framework you're interested in go out and join them and spend time with other people who are also trying to learn these tools and who are also willing to share and help each other how to better use these things so please go out to reach out to your local community I have found that over the years my time spent in the community was returned to me tenfold not only did it allow me to meet new people it also kind of introduced me to new technologies that I might never have heard heard about otherwise but it also gave me relationships that and then I was able to draw from and I knew that if I had a question about something and I knew somebody from the community hey so-and-so was working with this or so-and-so might know a little bit about this and then I can reach out to them directly because I have that relationship and I can say hey you know can you help me with this or do what resource would you recommend for me to to learned us a little bit better so community is really really important again there are conferences there are user groups right now we have the CFP going on for Sunshine PHP which happens every February in Miami so if you're interested in PHP that's a good conference to attend if you're from South Florida please come see us at the South Florida PHP user group we meet every single month and and the topics are very various I mean we have a lot of different things we talked about so come out and join us or any any place any local user groups in your area please go out find them and and communicate and participate and be a positive actor for change tell others about your local communities and and help them grow one of the biggest things that I found that really helped me on a day to day in my day to day jobs has been to ignore the fads now pay attention to what's happening pay attention to what people are talking about in what they are doing and the technologies that they're using but be a little bit trepidatious and what that means is just don't jump in right don't jump on to the fads in and be all in like let me go do docker let me go do you know whatever the technology might be and I don't not saying that doctors bad I'm just saying it you know just be cautious about what you jump into I I see developers every single day who jump into a technology and everything has to be a hundred percent that technology and that's not always good either it's good to test out new technologies it's good to play with these new things but don't get drawn into the point where where every nail can only be hit by a hammer right and you know make sure that you're looking at things a little bit more openly and enjoy these new technologies have fun with them but but again don't don't leap all in for feds because what you'll find is that eventually one day you'll look back and you say oh wow I was hitting every one of those nails with the hammer and turned out some of them were screws I should have used a screwdriver right so just be aware of that don't jump all on board also by the same token don't be drawn into these these posts that we see out there about XX technology is dead and this technology is better than net technology these are just things that grab your attention and they aren't positive in any way they're just trying to get its clickbait to draw you into these articles and draw you into these things or somebody has recently jumped onto a fad and they're like oh yeah javascript everything javascript is the world and while javascript is awesome and while it can be used for many things it's not a hammer that should be used for every nail or screw it is it's something to be tempered and used where it where it applies but there's nothing wrong with use and other technologies where they best apply too so don't be drawn in by some of those things you know the technologies typically are not dying just because these posts say they are typically they're holding well this person just is being evangelistic about some fad that they got drawn into so don't fall too much for those I mean read them certainly so you know what might be coming down the line but look at it from an educational standpoint versus an emotional standpoint and and use new technologies in a tempered way you know don't jump all in and become over evangelistic about one thing over another there's a lot of fun technologies out there a lot of great things to do as a developer above all the number one thing and I have a few more things that I'm gonna share but the number one thing that I've found that has made me a better developer is to program more do more programming do more sample applications do more programming on a day to day basis reading about programming watching videos about programming reading blog posts all these things are awesome it is the debugging in the troubleshooting and all this that will lead to you becoming a better programmer and a better developer so please write more code make more mistakes do more things go back and refactor some of the code that you've created in the past these are the things that will make you a better developer now by that same token maybe maybe you don't have enough tests to keep you busy one way around that is something like Stack Overflow there are problems posted every single day on Stack Overflow and some other places too but go out to Stack Overflow occasionally if you're a little bit bored and you don't know what to do don't get sucked into the latest drama on Twitter instead go out to Stack Overflow and see what problems in your given technology of preference is see what questions people are asking see what problems they're posing out there and hack on them a little bit if you know how to solve it post post the solution so other people can benefit from and answer their questions on Stack Overflow and help out people again this goes back to community in a way but at the same time it also gives you something to do as a programmer so that way if you're doing more hands-on things if you're troubleshooting more if you're adding more code to these things then you are still learning oftentimes a lot of people answering the questions on Stack Overflow they might not know the answer right offhand so they do a quick little proof-of-concept or they hack something together and then they post a solution out there to help others now granted there are some people who know alive and they answered the questions really quickly and that's ok but right for most of us that don't know those answers off the back of our hand we we do tend to go ahead and hack something together really quickly and help out those in need another way to do this sort of thing is daily coding challenges there are multiple sites out there multiple services that have a daily coding challenge and you can sign up for them they have like a little newsletter area that you can sign up on a daily basis they will send you some programming challenge that you can hack on there's also a daily daily coding problem you can do a search for daily coding problem and you'll find their site interview cake does some of these things where they send problems to solve oh it's more it's more geared toward people who are getting ready to go into a interview so that they can get practice answering questions but it works well for programming challenges and there's also daily interview Pro which does kind of the same thing they have questions that are geared toward helping people solve coding problems during interviews but again the daily the daily emails that they send out with these coding problems is awesome to keep you fresh to keep you programming and again this goes back to the point a couple points ago which is just keep program and keep developing by writing more solutions by touching the code more troubleshooting debugging but maybe writing tests you know you can do all these things to help you and these daily coding challenges helped a great deal with it so I hope you found this video helpful if you did please like the video down below and also remember to subscribe so you can see more videos like this in the future hopefully they'll help you become a better developer thank you

Channel: Beachcasts Programming Videos

Views: 1,514

Keywords: advance your programming skills, how to improve as a developer, advance programming skills, advance developer skills, php videos, learn programming, how to improve as a software developer, be a better developer, how to be a better developer, developer improvements, how to be a better software developer, what to learn to become a web developer, php tech videos, web development, beachcasts, adamculp, adam culp, web development tutorial, php programming videos, php tutorials

Id: X6abVw8SlZc

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 27 2019