For my part, I got involved in an open-source project very early on. I produced plugins and patches for the project, and people in the community gave valuable c

For my part, I got involved in an open-source project very early on. I produced plugins and patches for the project, and people in the community gave valuable criticism and helped me improve my code. I didn't do this consciously to improve my skills, I stupidly thought I was "good enough" back then. However I remember that changed when I sent a 20 line patch to a developer, and he replied "Wouldn't this be better?" with a 2-line patch that also caught corner-cases I'd missed. From that day forwards I realised exactly how unskilled I was, despite knowing well the language and APIs, and I realised how valuable that community was to me. I haven't stayed with that project, I moved about a bit. I found that I enjoy networking and protocols, so I'm more active in another community now. Finding something that I really like doing I would count as the second thing that helped me improve. I find it sad the number of people I encounter who are just programmers for the sake of it, and not because they love what they do - some of them are good, but I've seen some of the worst code come from these people (who really couldn't care less). TL;DR I'm really really good ;) [I should learn to avoid tagging British sarcasm to everything I write, it always bites me back]