Exactly -- someone else. I don't have a formal Computer Science education. I'm juggling reading the K+R C book, Knuth's Literate Programming, Odersky's Programming Scala and the Ruby "pickaxe" book. All of them have been great. But their impact on my code and career all pale in comparison to the strides I've made by paying attention to the social side of programming.
You should now:
* Talk to other programmers. I found a couple groups on Meetup.com that I like attending. Sometimes they're not specifically about programming (like my UX meetup). That's good. I am cross-training. I have asked some programmers whose work I admire for beer/coffee, on me, and I've had some great experiences. You will hear new ideas, and will have to defend your opinions.
* Find an open source project you like on Github.com and start contributing. Start with easy #bugs in "Issues". If you don't know which ones are easy, ask. You will get invaluable peer review, sometimes from the best minds in our field. You will read great code, and you will modify it, and so you will understand it deeply. You will have the satisfaction of knowing your code is used by hundreds or thousands of people.
Exactly -- someone else. I don't have a formal Computer Science education. I'm juggling reading the K+R C book, Knuth's Literate Programming, Odersky's Programming Scala and the Ruby "pickaxe" book. All of them have been great. But their impact on my code and career all pale in comparison to the strides I've made by paying attention to the social side of programming.
You should now:
* Talk to other programmers. I found a couple groups on Meetup.com that I like attending. Sometimes they're not specifically about programming (like my UX meetup). That's good. I am cross-training. I have asked some programmers whose work I admire for beer/coffee, on me, and I've had some great experiences. You will hear new ideas, and will have to defend your opinions.
* Find an open source project you like on Github.com and start contributing. Start with easy #bugs in "Issues". If you don't know which ones are easy, ask. You will get invaluable peer review, sometimes from the best minds in our field. You will read great code, and you will modify it, and so you will understand it deeply. You will have the satisfaction of knowing your code is used by hundreds or thousands of people.
* Find beauty in other things.