Most novelists are bad. Most devs are bad. No one seems to know how to tell they are a bad one, but I think we have a good filter: do you voraciously read other

Most novelists are bad. Most devs are bad. No one seems to know how to tell they are a bad one, but I think we have a good filter: do you voraciously read other people's work? Code in books is dumb. The real code to read is other code you use or interact with. eg reading the jquery source or the Rails source or code reviewing a colleague. Almost always one does this while answering a question about this source. Trying to understand what a library call is doing or tracing a bug. You learn a lot this way including coding tricks and style points.