Single most effective thing I do to improve my programming skills? Refactor. It might be enough to get a hack done to get some functionality working but if yo

Single most effective thing I do to improve my programming skills? Refactor. It might be enough to get a hack done to get some functionality working but if you never revisit it you wont learn what you did wrong or what you could have done better. Refactoring your solutions trying to improve efficiency, or usability (of the code), the process of examining your previous work and discovering how it could be made better will greatly benefit your learning process. Some times you may realize right away after finishing a piece of code how you could have done it better. Other times, its not until months or years later when you've learned and experienced more that upon revisiting the code you realize how you could improve it. It's one thing to learn about programming techniques and designs, but it's refactoring your old attempts with those new techniques and designs that leads to understanding and empowerment.