ASK HN: How can an okay developer become a great developer?
Though I have been doing very well as a lead/manager and as the devops guy who wears many hats, I realize that I was never a great developer. I can get things done but the solutions I build are not very elegant.
This was fine until now. Due to the monotonous nature of the work and some issues at the workplace, I decided to look for a change. I interviewed at two places and both gave me a take-home challenge. I did both and also did some troubleshooting stuff pretty quickly. However, I got rejected. I feel that this was due to the lack of elegance in my solution.
I would like to be a developer again and I want to be very good at it. With all my DevOps, cloud platforms, DBs like Hadoop, Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB etc., I believe I can be a very good addition to a team if only I could code better.
Can you suggest how I can bring my programming skills to the next level? I can look at code and understand things. I have the basics in line. I understand OOM and functional programming. I can code small assignments in multiple languages. What I need is to be able to write awesome code myself. How should I go about it? How can I work on it in a way that it comes naturally to me?
Thanks for your inputs.