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Programming Achievements: How to Level Up as a Developer

This gist is part of a blog post. Check it out at:

http://jasonrudolph.com/blog/2011/08/09/programming-achievements-how-to-level-up-as-a-developer

programming-achievements.md

Learn a variety of programming paradigms:

• Write a program in assembly language
• Write an application in a functional language
• Write an application in an object-oriented language
• Write an application in a prototype-based language
• Write an application in a logic programming language
• Write an application in Erlang
• Write an application in Forth

Experience the ins and outs of programming for different platforms:

• Write a nontrivial web app
• Write a nontrivial desktop app
• Write a nontrivial mobile app
• Write an embedded app
• Write a multi-platform app
• Write a realtime system
• Write a native application on at least two different operating systems
• Write a 3D graphics application using pixel and vertex shaders

Concurrency, Parallelism and Distributed Programming:

• Write a multi-threaded application with shared mutable state
• Write a multi-threaded application using software transactional memory
• Write a multi-threaded application using mutexes and other locks
• Write an application using a messaging queue
• Write an application using the actor model
• Parallelize a segment of an application

Enhance your understanding of the building blocks that we use as developers:

• Write a networking client (e.g., HTTP, FTP)
• Write a device driver
• Write a B-tree database
• Wrap an existing library to provide a better (more pleasant) user experience
• Write an application or framework that provides a plugin model
• Write a testing framework
• Write a programming language compiler
• Write a programming language virtual machine
• Write an emulator
• Write an API
• Write a client for your API

Supporting Software:

• Benchmark a program on multiple, different data sets. (ie., really large, really small, entirely made up of edge cases.)
• Profile an application to find performance bottlenecks
• Report a bug in an external library
• Write readable, usable, accurate documentation for a program
• Write tests for a piece of software where they are lacking
• Write unit tests, functional tests and integration tests for an application

Enlighten yourself with koans, katas, and the wisdom of ages:

• Complete five code katas
• Complete the programming koans for a language that you want to learn
• Attend a code retreat
• Read SICP and complete all the exercises

Program in the open:

• Contribute to an open source project
• Have a patch accepted
• Earn commit rights on a significant open source project
• Publish an open source project
• Perform a Refactotum of an open source project

Learn by teaching others:

• Present a lightning talk
• Present at a local user group
• Present at a conference
• Deliver a training course
• Publish a tutorial
• Publish a constructive code review of an open source project
• Write a programming book

Learn about algorithms:

• Determine the asymptotic running time of an algorithm
• Implement basic Sorting Algorithms: Bubblesort, Heapsort, Quicksort... Understand their tradeoffs.
• Implement basic Graph algorithms: Prim, Kruskal, Dijkstra, A*...
• Create and implement a dynamic programm
• Proof a problem NP Complete
• Understand the halting problem

Learn tools:

• Use a different SCM for a Project (Git/Mercurial...)
• Use a different IDE for a Project
• Set up a project with a Build Tool (Make, Rake, SBT, Ant, Maven...)
• Set up a CI server