How to improve your coding skills daily
Daily practice will help you become a better software developer
If you want to be a good software developer you have to be constantly learning and improving your coding skills.
Coding is a skill that can be improved with consistent disciplined practice. Using the correct approach to learning will make you a better software developer and you will appreciate the difference within a short space of time. Improving your coding skills will create many opportunities for you.
The question you may be asking yourself is - How do you improve your coding skills daily?
In this article, you will learn how to improve your coding skills daily. You will learn how to build a daily learning habit and the different practical approaches you can use daily to improve your coding skills.
Build a daily habit
Your starting point for improving your coding skills should be to set some goals for yourself. Your goals will be constant reminders for why you want to improve your coding skills. They will serve as constant motivation for you to keep learning and growing.
To set your goals you can ask yourself the following questions:
Why did I become a software developer?
What software development skills do I want to improve?
What do you want to achieve with the improved software development skills?
Write down your answers to these questions and use them to set some goals for your coding improvement journey.
After setting your goals it is important to establish a daily learning habit that will improve your coding skills. Start small, it is easier to build a new habit and be consistent if it is simple to do. As an example, you could start with 15 - 30 minutes of learning per day.
Try to schedule the learning for the same time daily. Habits form more easily if they are repetitive. Your mind gets used to doing the same task at the same time each day. As an example you could schedule for your learning to start as soon as you wake up each day, or after eating dinner each evening. You can use a calendar invite or alarm as a reminder/trigger to start your learning sessions so you don’t forget and skip them.
Once you start building your daily coding learning habit, be consistent. Show up every day for the learning sessions. You may skip some days, that is ok, you are human and things may come up. However, try to avoid skipping consecutive days as you might break the learning habit and struggle to rebuild it.
Now that you know how to build your daily coding learning habit, in the following section, you will learn about practical approaches you can use to improve your coding skills.
Improve your coding skills
There are many different practical approaches you can use to improve your coding skills. A suggestion is to start with one approach and build the habit of doing it daily. Once you are consistent with the learning habit you can then add other approaches to enhance your learning.
Read books
If you want to be a good software developer you have to be constantly learning. One of the best ways to learn is through reading good books. Reading expands your mind and there are plenty of good books you can learn from. Select books that teach the coding skills you want to improve and read them during your scheduled learning time daily.
Listen to podcasts
If you want to be a good software developer you have to be constantly learning. One of the best ways to learn is through listening to good podcasts. Podcasts have become more popular as a learning medium. The great thing about them is that you can listen to them as a secondary task: such as while you are on your commute to/from work or while exercising. Select podcasts that teach the coding skills you want to improve and listen to them during your scheduled learning time daily.
Read open source code
Authors of books become better writers through becoming better readers. They achieve this through reading more books. Similarly, you can improve your coding skills by reading more code and learning/understanding different code design approaches from multiple codebases. You can learn a lot by reading code written by other good software developers. One of the best places to read code is in open source projects that are written in the programming language you want to improve your coding skills in. Find these open-source projects and read their source code during your scheduled learning time daily.
Follow coders you admire online
Many inspirational software developers have a presence online where they share their knowledge. They are on platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Dev.to, Hashnode, and many others. You can follow these software developers on these platforms and you will be notified when they share new content which you can learn from. You can also actively visit these platforms daily during your scheduled learning time.
Work on a personal project
If you want to become a better software developer you have to solve more coding problems in different contexts and codebases. A personal project is something you do aside from your main job. It is a project you create for yourself in pursuit to learn something new or completely outside of your day-to-day activities or even comfort zone. Personal projects allow you to learn new patterns, programming languages, and concepts you otherwise would have ignored. The theory is just theory until you practice. Identify a problem you would like to solve for yourself and work on it during your daily scheduled learning time.
Play online coding games
There are online platforms that allow you to improve your coding skills through gamified learning. These platforms will help you grow your programming skills and increase your confidence as you solve puzzles and progress through multiple levels. This keeps your learning journey interesting. Examples of such platforms are - Codewars, HackerRank, and CodeGym. Find a platform that teaches the coding skills you want to improve and use the platform during your daily scheduled learning time.
Final thoughts
Improving your coding skills will help to create future opportunities for you. The most effective way to improve any skill is through consistent daily practice.
In this article,
you learned how to build a daily learning habit and the different practical approaches you can use daily to improve your coding skills.