How to improve as a Developer (personal tips)

In the beginning of my learning path, there was so many times where I wanted to increase my skills or just learn something new, but had no ideas for what to do. Or even moments where there were so many ideas and I didn’t know how to start any of them. I used to struggle to keep my focus when learning something new, or working in a new project I had planned.
After some thinking and research, I’ve found some tips that helped me to decide what, and more important how to do that.

First of all, have you decided what you want to build or learn?

If you have already decided which technology you want to learn or some project you want to build, or even just some little thing you want to improve in yourself? If yes, congratulations, you’ve done your homework (and you can go directly to the topic “How to organize yourself?”). But if not, you are in the same place as me in the beginning.
Some ideas if you don’t have any yet are: Habits tracker; Work with a public API; Any new technology; Automate or solve any personal trouble (I really like this one); Weather Checker?

Sorry for that, but it is what it is.

After you choose what you want to do, break your entire project in small goals. Start with the closer to a “Hello World” you can.

Fix this mindset: Make it work, after that make it beautiful. Don’t worry if your project doesn’t look so fancy, faster, or even well written. As a developer, we must understand the problem we’re facing, and the ability to break it in small steps is a huge helper.

Take your time to do your things.
As soon you start building your project’s base, the improvement will be so much smoother than if you had ran over the steps just to make it beautiful first.

I prefer an app that solve my problem, and you?

Some ideas that I think are great to challenge yourself (even if you have already build any of this, you may consider give it a try and make it better than last time).

Organize yourself

Make a deal with yourself, and set how much time you want to spend it which day or in the entire week, and stick with it.
If you are familiar with GIT, create your directory in Github (or any other place you like) and make sure to update your project frequently. Seeing your improves in the code will boost your will for finish it.

That’s it. I hope I’ve helped you in some way. See you in later posts.