How do you keep your basic skills from atrophy?
- by kojiro
I've been programming for about 10 years, and I've started to migrate to more of a project management position. I still do coding, but less often now. One of the things that I think is holding me back in my career is that I can't "let go". I think I fear letting hard-won programming skills atrophy while I sit in meetings and annotate requirements. (Not to mention I don't trust people to write requirements who don't understand the code.)
I can't just read books and magazines about coding. I'm involved in some open source projects in my free time, and stackoverflow and friends help a bit, because I get the opportunity to help people solve their programming problems without micromanaging, but neither of these are terribly structured, so it's tempting to work first on the problems I can solve easily.
I guess what I'd like to find is a structured set of exercises (don't care what language or environment) that…
…I can do periodically
…has some kind of time requirement so I can tell if I've been goofing off
…has some kind of scoring so I can tell if I'm making mistakes
Is there such a thing? What would you do to keep your skills fresh?
