True winners build themselves during their practice time.

That’s something you might have recognized yourself when looking at masterclass performers. You see them doing something and you think to yourself:

“I wonder how much this person practised for achieving this”.

Coding is no exception to this rule. And if you want to be a top performer too, you have to include daily practice of your skills in your life.

Let’s see how you can easily do that with the following list.

You Should Always Have A New Goal And Work Toward It

This is a very personal belief I have, and it’s something that guides me through my life every day. I feel like people always need to set a new goal in their mind. Something that they want to achieve, and they have to work hard to get it.

That’s true for me both on a personal level and in my career. I suggest you set one target at the time for yourself and you build your way toward it.

For example, you could:

• Build an app you always wanted to create.
• Finally, finish all those Udemy coding courses you have in your library.
• Learn a new language you were curious about.
• Learn new patterns, techniques, for improving the code you write daily.

Find a way to achieve your goals. Write down the necessary steps if you feel like.

This behaviour has immense value. It will make you grow as a professional because you will learn new stuff and practice. It will give you new occasions because you never know what some knowledge can bring you to in the future.

Take Challenges

Professionals need to take time to exercise their processes. Pro guitarists practice their chords every day, runners try their sprint on every occasion.

You should do the same. So that you can automize those processes and make tasks that seem hard to you today very easy tomorrow.

By taking code challenges, you can practice your logical thinking, your “programmer’s mind”. How you solve a solution when a problem is given to you.

These challenges are something you can do daily. I know it’s hard to always find time for them, but I suggest you make 2 or 3 every weeks. So you can keep your mind always prepared and sharp for confronting new coding problems.

Here are the best sites to take some of these challenges:

HackerRank . CodeChef . CodeWars . TopCoder . DevDocs.

Share Your Knowledge

Another way to get better daily as a developer is to simply share what you learn. In this way, you can really maximize your knowledge by having to explain what you know.

With this approach, you can also do some great networking with other fellow developers and help them. For example, you could:

• Open your own coding blog.
• Publish here on Medium or Hashnode.
• Tweet coding tricks with the developers’ community.
• Read Other People’s Code

Staying on the line of the example given above, I guess that every runner would love to work out or see Usain Bolt in action because they could see a top performer showing his abilities and learn.

You can do the same. Find top, interesting project’s source code and check them out. See how those projects were built, what patterns were used, what techniques the authors managed to use that maybe you didn’t even know existed.

Conclusion

Trying to improve every, single, day as a developer may seem exhausting. But it’s not actually that hard as I’ve shown you in this article. Always remember that exercise may not show its results as you expect. Practising is something that builds your skills slowly, and those skills will eventually rise in front of your eyes, making you realize how much a single, daily effort has compounded over time making you a better professional.

— Piero