

Ask HN: Did you ever stop improving your programming? - vld

I've been a programmer for many years, in multiple languanges. Up until a year or so, I was very proud when I finished, what I thought at the time, a big and hard project. But then, few months after, when I looked at the code I started thinking:
this line shouldn't be there, these 10 lines could have been greatly improved, why didn't I use &#60;insert famous class here&#62; instead of writing 1000 lines of garbage, and so on.
But lately I feel like there's no more great self-improvement, I look at my recent code and say "well, that's perfect". 
Did you ever feel like this?
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user24
Check where you stand on the Programmer Competency Matrix:
[http://www.indiangeek.net/wp-
content/uploads/Programmer%20co...](http://www.indiangeek.net/wp-
content/uploads/Programmer%20competency%20matrix.htm)

~~~
ericHosick
Perhaps covered under Requirements Level(3) "Able to suggest better
alternatives and flows to given requirements based on experience"...

But it seems this list misses one of the most important lessons to learn in
programming: initially try to solve the problem without programming. That is,
design away the problem instead of solving it.

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plam
Perhaps you're plateauing with your current domain or tools. Try other
problems/languages and look back a few months later.

