AGILA

10 Tasks Java Developers Should Perform To Improve Their Skills

10 04 2008

Learn english. Your english has not to be perfect, yet you should be able to read english Java literature and to write a little english documentation (aka javadoc) for the software you are developing.
Learn the basics. You should know what Java interfaces are, how generics work, and so on. That means, beside your programming skills you should know some theoratical aspects about Java.
Take one of the frameworks, tools, libraries, or whatever, and learn as much as possible about it. Then move to the next framework, tool, or whatever… In that way you will gather a lot of knowledge over time.
Learn UML. And learn to regularly use a good UML tool like Magic Draw in order to make documentation about the software you wrote, or about some more advanced ideas of the design or implementation of your software.
Read Java magazines, Java home pages, Java blogs, Java books, and learn learn learn.
Write different kind of software with different kind of people in different ways. Improve your practical skills and increase your experience.
Improve your social skills. How well can you communicate with managers, marketing people, engineers, medicins, and so on? Attend communication workshops. If you’re really serious about this, learn some kind of psychotherapy (by the way, NLP helps a lot, but be aware, there are much too many NLP idiots on this planet, so it might be very difficult to find serious seminars. It helps if the trainers are psychotherapists, too, or know about that).
Make friends with people from other groups of the company you’re working for.
Always be open-minded. Whenever you think you know something for sure, then you’re wrong;-) And I mean this in regard to opionions about what the best programming language is, the best Web framework, the best whatever.
Try to learn a new programming language every year. Good examples for Java developers might by Groovy, Python, Scala.