Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Becomeing a better Developer

Listing to a Hanselminutes a while ago the subject came up of how to become a better developer and this got me thinking, what am I doing to become a better developer? I read blogs, listen to Dot net rocks and Hansel minutes, I go to the occasional Netdug (Boise .NET developers group) , read Visual Studio magazine (mostly skimming it), I went to code camp, and I started a weekly training session at work where every Wednesday we watch video tutorials, but is any of this really making me a better developer?

At this point the question would really have to be is how do you tell if your becoming a better developer? So I look at some of the things I have done in the passed and what I'm doing right now
  • running asp.net application in Linux with mod mono and using mod_aspdotnet with Apache, but this is more operations stuff.
  • using Ghost doc and Sandcastle to document my code, and using Component One's free spellchecker
  • using Resharper and the VS refactor tools to make my code better
  • creating unit tests and sort of doing test driven development
  • playing with IOC and DI, and just using interfaces
  • refactoring existing projects to make them more maintainable and better performing
  • using tools like FXCop and Style cop to do code review
At the end of the day the real question is am I doing better work today then yesterday, I think so, I hope so? only time will tell.

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