Just code a lot and do it daily. If there is nothing to code on your day job or just old legacy cruft to maintain then try code golfing. Code Golf is about pro

Just code a lot and do it daily. If there is nothing to code on your day job or just old legacy cruft to maintain then try code golfing. Code Golf is about programming as short as possible and it's also a section on StackExchange [1] where you find daily tasks and many people solving them in many languages. You learn so much because... - You code really every day and you code new stuff - Motivation is at its max and you want to be faster than the others and have the shortest piece of code; so you still keep coding after your submission to shave every byte away - And you learn tons of stuff; reason: you spent thinking hours about your solution, how to tweak it etc and suddenly, you see somebody popping in the answers who did it way better than you, so you analyze and study their implementation for hours like you would never read others' source code, adapt their algorithm and learn; especially when it's about array or bit manipulation StackExchange's Code Golf has a vast selection of tasks and some many awesome programmers there; it's just insane, some guys deliver 10 byte long solutions within minutes while I need 2 hours and 150 bytes - I want to stress–and this might be the most important topic—writing code is one part of coding but there at Code Golf, you learn that the approach, the core algorithm is more important, and can vary so much, so coding is not just writing commands in a text editor, no it's thinking about the right approach and second about writing it down. - And you see and learn how same problems are solved in different languages - One thing which you need to get used to are all these golfing languages which are indeed esoteric but every task is solved in all the mainstream languages as well; at the beginning I didn't like all these golfing languages like Jelly, Pyth, MATL but they grew on me and now I understand them better but find them still a bit awkward; so I like more the JS, Java, C, Python solutions; but again you find everything there, lots of solutions in Haskell, Brainf*, PowerShell, TIBasic, x86 assembler, Vimsrcipt, Mathematica and so on Compared to standard day routine coding where you glue one API to another Code Golf is ultra refreshing and I'd never had so much fun when programming and learned that much at the same time. I think there are other code golf communities but I think the one on StackExchange is the biggest. [1] http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/ http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/