Important advice from The Pragmatic Programmer (page 62):
“Learn at least one new language every year.”
It’s advice I’ve been trying to follow more seriously since I first started reading the book last month. One site I’ve been using to learn more JavaScript that’s proven to be pretty cool for that is codewars.com (thanks Dean). The katas are small enough that it doesn’t take a ton of research to figure out how to do something in a language you’re learning. Once you’ve developed a working solution, you can see how others have solved it (and compare your solution to theirs). Since you write and test the katas in the browser, there’s none of the overhead of firing up an editor or uploading your solution somewhere. Ideally I’d be writing a few katas per day, but a few katas a week are what I’ve been able to manage so far.
Since Apple introduced yet another language (Swift) at WWDC earlier this week, I’m starting to learn that language as well. So far, the syntax is a lot easier to grasp than Objective-C. The only real hassle with writing the code examples as I read the language guide is that XCode 6 Beta crashes every half hour.
With both languages (or any language really), the real leap forward comes from building something non-trivial with them. Figuring out what that non-trivial something will be is another challenge altogether. I wish there were a sites like codewars.com (or Project Euler) that put out larger-scale problems intended to be solved with software. Being part of the developer interview loop at work pushed me to create a few problems of that sort for use in interviewing developer candidates, but none of those exercises require more than 20 minutes of work. More significant challenges should make it useful to explore features beyond basic control flow and data structures.