Hello and welcome to Hlab, in this post we are going to answer a question that has been asked a lot. The question has been asked in various ways including but not limited to:

1. How can I become a better developer?
2. What should I build?
3. Do you have any demo project that I can build?

In this post, we are going to try and give a good guideline of how you can grow as a developer. We are going to give you three key things that we believe are essential to becoming a better developer and to help you keep growing. Here are the three building blocks that we will discuss in this post:

• Practice
• Question existing best practices and solutions
• Discuss and Share

Practice

To us, practicing means building dummy projects or part of a project. A good example would be: build a rest api, an authentication flow or a dummy image or pdf upload. Try and set your own goals, challenges and build stuff. By practicing on your own, you learn a lot. There are two kind of application you can build, a simplified version of popular websites or apps. If you find a website that is interesting to you or a certain feature is interesting try and duplicate it. For example, if you are trying to clone a site like Facebook, try to build a feature like how to send a friend request , a group feature, a tag feature, a video feature. This could be a good starting point.

The second type of application that you can build is “evergreen” apps like a to do app, a blog, a shopping cart. The beauty about this apps is that they have all the CRUD(create, read, update, delete) operations in them which helps in practicing to use a new framework or database. The main take away in the practice section is to focus on the feature you want to learn and leave out the rest. By doing this you will face challenges, something will not working as expected. Try and Google, visit Stackoverflow, youtube, tutorials etc.

We would love to hear how you practice, leave comment?

Question existing best practices and solutions

It’s always a good idea to challenge the existing practices, remember this practice exist for a reason. You can either come up with a better solution than the existing one or you can come up with a worse solution. A better case, you can come up with new pattern or a better practice which might be adopted. The idea here is to always challenge what you are being taught, and this include the tutorials in Hlab. There more than one way to solve a particular problem.

Discuss and Share

This is a core part of becoming a better developer. Lets start with discussing, to us, discussing means getting involved in communities like Youtube comments, Stackoverflow, twitter, Quora etc. This allows you to stay up to date with trends. Of course, sharing your opinion in this platforms is very valuable. Just make sure that you Question but also accept other opinions respectfully. Don’t put other people opinions down, discuss in a friendly way.

You can contribute to a community by sharing links, blog articles you found because every one benefits. You can also contribute to open source projects on github or bit-bucket, this is a nice way of building a portfolio. You can also write you own blog tutorials. Of course at this point you are a bit exposed and a lot of people refrain from this due to fear of unknown. We can only encourage you to try and contribute, share your knowledge. Learn from the mistake you make and don’t view them as failure. Share your code. Your can also donate to open source, it’s a way of giving back to society.

Do you share your Knowledge?