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Improving your skills as a 9 to 5 programmer
- gorpomon 11y agoHonestly, 1 hour a week is not enough. I do 1 hour every morning and have benefitted tremendously from it. Before you scoff that I must not have enough work, note that I've developed and built several large web applications for my fortune 500 company all on my own, I've been busy. You can make 1 hour a day work simply by just working it out so that you're not pulled into meetings constantly. If at work, you can manage to be on 1 or 2 projects only, and each has defined meeting times (like standups or weekly progress reports), then you can budget your time to code. At my job, we assume 6 hours of coding per day, 2 for meetings. I make that 5 hours of coding per day, and 1 for learning. No one notices, and if they did no one would care because the 1 hour I take every morning to explore gets me in a great place to spend the rest of the day being really productive. The benefits have been tremendous, my code is of higher quality. I'm becoming a technical leader to my team. I've done the most presentations on new technology and I've gotten to architect our apps more. All because I work less at work, and explore more.
- itamarst 11y agoDefinitely more than an hour a week is better. But less experienced programmers need some practice in focusing and efficiency, which is why I suggested starting smaller. Once one has more focus it's easier to have more time to learn, and then you get a nice feedback loop going like you did.
- sssilver 11y agoI think it would be fair to say that most of us can accommodate much more than an hour per week at work. Perhaps an hour per day or more.
- WalterSear 11y agoAn hour a week? This is the wishful thinking of someone with precluding commitments.