Top 5 ways to improve your coding skills

Any learning will always need some improvements. It will mostly happen gradually and as we improve day by day we ourselves will find it very interesting to continue our coding. If our coding skills are good, we will have a good feeling about writing more code. There is always room for improvement for any skill. Let's see what are the top 5 ways to improve our coding skills.

Contributing to the community or open-source projects

Open source projects are the best way to learn to code. Many people would have work experience or would be working in an IT firm that gives them the opportunity to code. The problem with that is that they will not be able to learn everything from their job and most likely not all the jobs can create different opportunities for individuals. There can be instances where people will have to do lots of self-learning.

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Open source projects are a good place where people can do a lot of self-learning. They can technically learn certain coding tactics and different ways in which they can code. Understanding open source projects and contributing to them is one of the best ways of learning.

Practice what you read online

Just reading online or watching a video online alone is not going to help. Some people even say that they forget what they learn online. That's one of the biggest reasons why we should be practicing what we learn online. We can pick up a project or an idea we have in our mind and start working on that with what we learned online. That's one beat way to practice. There are also websites that make us practice while learning. Freecodecamp.org is one such website. The tasks that are given to us will also require us to practice them the and there. This will make things stay in our heads for a longer period of time.

Observe the coding style of other developers and learn from them

This is definitely a skill that not all developers can grasp. Not everyone can learn the coding style from others. It is even challenging to observe the coding style and learn because only a skilled developer or an experienced developer will be able to do that. I'm not saying that a normal developer will not be able to do it. All I'm saying is that an experienced developer will be able to do it easily.

We can watch youtube videos and try to learn from them. That is when we will be able to observe that someone would have approached a solution in a different way. Maybe if we had done that we would have done it differently. That's what we call coding style and it differs from one person to another person and we have a big scope to earn from others.

Freelancing

As I mentioned in one of the previous paragraphs, our full-time coding job may not be the only source for us to learn. We should be having other places from where we can continue our learning and improve our code writing skills. Freelancing is one best places. We can sign up ourselves for projects we are capable of delivering. We can do some projects during weekends and outside our normal working hours to stretch a little bit further on our coding skills. Freelancing is the best way to gain more confidence in writing code and explore more opportunities outside our day-to-day boring code.

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Diversify your knowledge but stick to a zone

Diversifying our knowledge on different things is very important but at the same time, it is also very important to stick to a particular zone. We shouldn't be exploring too many areas when it comes to coding. If we are comfortable with front-end development and especially uncomfortable with backend development, it is good to get projects that focus more on the front-end code. Being a full-stack developer, I wouldn't recommend restricting anybody to just the front end or backend alone. Exploring everything is good but at the same time sticking to a zone and improving a lot on that is helpful for fast learning.

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Posted with STEMGeeks