What programming habit helped you improve the most as a developer?

1

Hi everyone,

I’m curious to know which habits or practices made the biggest difference in your coding journey.

For example:

  • Writing cleaner code

  • Building projects regularly

  • Reading documentation

  • Contributing to open source

  • Learning algorithms and problem-solving

  • Debugging techniques

What is one thing you started doing that significantly improved your programming skills?

I’d love to hear experiences from both beginners and experienced developers. Your advice could help others who are currently learning to code.

2

Welcome to the forum @emilyuk02141

Contributing to open source made learning to code feel real.

Going through the motions of entering code in the browser to complete a challenge didn’t make much of an impact at first. The experience was sometimes really frustrating. As I gained knowledge through study and experience by building personal projects I found I wanted to level up. Contributing to open source was the next logical step.

This meant reading contribution documentation, learning about and working with IDES, and lots of time looking at PRs and issues.

Also, answering questions on the forum helped solidify the learning. I first learnt Python by answering questions in the Python category.

The ability to apply your learning to help others for me made the biggest difference.

Happy coding