Leveling Up Revisited

by Richard Jones

I previously wrote about leveling up as a programmer. At the time, I had forked a list of programming achievements originally belonging to Jason Rudolph and left his list mostly intact.

That was a mistake on my part.

Most of his achievements are pretty high level -- the kind of stuff you achieve over the span of an entire career. While it's vitally important to poke your head above ground every once in a while and make sure you're headed in the right direction, it turns out that's not really what I need at the moment.

Instead, I'm looking to make a list that I will revisit every few weeks or so. For something like that, I find it's more useful to look at things I want to accomplish within a horizon of six months to a year.

So, with that all said, here's what my list looks like at the time of writing. I removed most of the high level stuff and added in a bunch of skills related to Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Become more fluent in Ruby

  • Commit the Ruby syntax to memory
  • Commit significant standard libraries to memory
  • Utilize a metaprogramming technique in an app

Become more fluent in Ruby on Rails

  • Use Haml in an app
  • Use JavaScript in an app the Rails way
  • Use Coffeescript in an app
  • Deploy an app with Capistrano
  • Implement background jobs in an app
  • Commit form helpers API to memory
  • Commit ActiveRecord::Migration API to memory
  • Commit ActiveRecord validation API to memory

Learn by teaching others:

  • Present at a local user group
  • Teach at a RailsBridge workshop
  • Mentor a new Rails programmer