Jon Rumsey

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Reading Notes Upgrade Your Technical Skills with Practice

Resources and Links

From the Wayback Machine, a document from Happy Bear Software

Deliberate Practice

Skills improvement comes with experience and practice.
Knowledge expansion comes with testing and trials, not by accident.
Build multiple apps, one after another, through deliberate practice.
Ask myself whether what I am doing pushes me outside of my comfort zone.

If I am still operating within my comfort zone, am I really learning? If I am writing the same programs I wrote 3 months ago, or a year or more ago, but with a different name, am I just 'playing through a song'?

Expert musicians don't just play through their songs in entirety and hope to get better, they practice the hard stuff again and again in order to improve.

Advice Gleaned From Reading

Do not rely on your day job to challenge you in the right ways that promote learning.
Feedback on efforts is usually immediate (in the coding world) so use that as rapid learning opportunities.
Embrace the difficulty, and avoid becoming frustrated (slows or blocks learning).
Challenge yourself with tasks that once achieved, you've learned something new.

Challening Yourself

[ ] What do you want to learn next?
[ ] What would be cool/fun to learn but been to afraid to try?
[ ] Pick a small, finishable challenge away from your current focus to pull you out of your comfort zone and into new realms of learning and experience.

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