Let's talk about how helping others can make you a better programmer.
Welcome back to my blog! My name is Tim Buchalka with another programming tip of the day and the topic now is how helping others can make you a better programmer.
There is a reason why that actually does work and if you're doing your job properly in helping others, you'd obviously want to make sure that you know what you're talking about and you'd normally research it. In other words, if someone asks you a programming question and you're not an expert but you've got some programming knowledge, chances are you're gonna verify (you should be doing this) that the information you're passing on is accurate.
You'll go out and do a bit of research to confirm your point before you actually do the process of helping someone else out. You've gone out, validated your answer and you've actually made yourself a better programmer in that contact because you've confirmed something that you may have known. Or perhaps when you're doing that research, you'll say, "Oh, hang on. I wasn't quite right. This is the case.", so you've learnt something. If you do that over and over, you'll find that the skills that you will acquire from that process will make you a better programmer.
Now helping others doesn't mean you have to create programming courses to the level that I've done. It can be something as simple as answering a question in forums. If there's a forum there with a question that you know you can answer, it might be to you a really basic question.
Important to keep in mind that when you're first starting out as a software developer, really basic things are really difficult to absorb so don't discount the fact that you've got some knowledge that you're able to impart, to share on and help others even at that early stage. As you progress in your career, you'll learn more things, your skills will become better and you'll be better equipped to teach people, not only those really basic things but some more advanced things as well.
Again, in the process of where you're vetting and researching your answers, you're making sure that you know what you're talking about. Whether you're testing your code or you're just researching - just the process of doing that on a continual basis and helping others will definitely make you a better programmer so keep that in mind. Again, don't think that you need to create a computer course or you need to spend hours to do this. It could be as simple as answering a question that you see in a question and answers section, a forum or wherever it is.
Like a friend who's interested in getting into programming, you might point them to a resource, a blog post or a course or an ebook or whatever it is to get them started. These types of things - helping others - can not only make you feel good but will also make you a better programmer.
So I hoped that helped. If you've got any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you.
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