- Publish code : If you keep a private journal and write the sentence "The car green is", you may keep writing that hundreds of times without realizing its bad grammar, until you happen to come upon the correct way of doing things. If you write that in an email, someone will instantly correct you and you probably won't make the mistake again. You can speed up your learning 1-2 orders of magnitude by sharing your work with others. Its embarrassing to make mistakes, but the only way to become great is to trudge through foul smelling swamp of embarrassment.
- Use Github.: The term version control used to scare the hell out of me. Heck, it still can be pretty cryptic. But version control is crucial to becoming a great programmer. Every other developer uses it, and you can't become a great programmer by coding alone, so you'll have to start using it. Luckily, you're learning during an ideal time. Github has made learning and using version control much easier. Also, Dropbox is a great tool that your mom could use and yet that has some of the powerful sharing and version control features of something like git.
- Treat yourself : Build things you think are cool. Build stuff you want to use. Its more fun to work on something you are interested in. Programming is like cooking, you don't know if what you make is good until you taste it. If something you cook tastes like dog food, how will you know unless you taste it? Build things you are going to consume yourself and you'll be more interested in making it taste not like dog food.
- Write English : Code is surprisingly more like English than like math. Great code is easy to read. In great code functions, files, classes and variables are named well. Comments, when needed, are concise and helpful. In great code the language and vocabulary is not elitist: it is easy for the layman to understand.
- Be prolific : You don't paint the Mona Lisa by spending 5 years working on 1 piece. You create the Mona Lisa by painting 1000 different works, one of them eventually happens to be the Mona Lisa. Write web apps, iPhone apps, Javascript apps, desktop apps, command line tools: as many things as you want. Start a small new project every week or even every day. You eventually have to strike a balance between quantity and quality, but when you are young the goal should be quantity. Quality will come in time.
- Learn Linux : The command line is not user friendly. It will take time and lots of repetition to learn it. But again, its what the world uses, you'll need at least a basic grasp of the command line to become a great programmer. When you get good at the command line, its actually pretty damn cool. You'll appreciate how much of what we depend on today was written over the course of a few decades. And you'll be amazed at how much you can do from the command line. If you use Windows, get CYGWIN! I just found it a few months ago, and it is much easier and faster than running virtualized Linux instances.
That's it, go get started !
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