Lately I’ve been reminded more than ever how impor­tant it is for devel­op­ers to always be sharp­en­ing their skill set. Often we get caught up in work and don’t take time to learn more about the immea­sur­ably large world of tech­nol­ogy around us.

Aside from writ­ing code — unar­guably the best thing you can do to be a bet­ter coder (duh) — read­ing is prob­a­bly the next best thing you can do. Lately I’ve been vora­ciously con­sum­ing development-related read­ing. So, if you don’t mind being meta for a few min­utes, read on for a few tips about reading!

Pay atten­tion to the news

Don’t ignore what’s going on around you. At the very least, check Hacker News every so often. Reddit has a few resources as well. Some of the best coders share the lat­est goings-on, as well as plenty of tips, tuto­ri­als, new open-source projects and other arti­cles. Aside from the link shar­ing itself, there’s even more dia­log hap­pen­ing in the comments.

Also, if you’re on Twitter, find a few good devel­op­ers to fol­low. I guar­an­tee that they’ll share their favorite links. (My team is shar­ing over on @emmaemailtech.)

Keep a read­ing list

Take the rec­om­men­da­tions of other devel­op­ers and blog­gers seri­ously. Promise your­self that one out of every five books you read is programming-related. Make a list. I have a giant to-read list I keep in my favorite to-do list man­ager that I try to tap into regularly.

Keep a list of arti­cles to read online, too. Whether you use Instapaper, Read It Later or your browser’s book­marks folder, don’t let good arti­cles get away from you just because you don’t have time for them right now. I’ve got a ton of book­marks saved in Read It Later right now to hone my JavaScript skills, all of which came from guys at a com­pany we con­tract with. Which leads to the next point.

Ask the pros

Don’t take for granted the tal­ent you work with every day. I guar­an­tee almost all of your cowork­ers have a book or blog you would ben­e­fit from. Just the other day I ended up read­ing MongoDB: The Definitive Guide on Alex‘s rec­om­men­da­tion while doing research for a new project. Furthermore, if you share inter­est­ing reads with your dev team, it’s only a mat­ter of time before they start shar­ing back.

To broaden your resources even more, ask pro­fes­sion­als out­side the office. If your com­pany hires con­tract work­ers, ask for their favorite resources in their area of exper­tise. If you’re at a con­fer­ence, there are hun­dreds of peo­ple full of sug­ges­tions. (Use the conference’s Twitter hash­tag to com­mu­ni­cate and share resources, books, tips and more.)

Read code

This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant kind of read­ing. Whether it’s swap­ping code reviews or find­ing refac­tor­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties in your code­base, nobody is going to fault you for tak­ing the ini­tia­tive to improve the code and processes around you.

Pick a new tool or library you’re inter­ested in and find a tuto­r­ial about it that uses code exam­ples. If there’s no writ­ten tuto­r­ial, there’s a good chance some­body has given a pre­sen­ta­tion about it. Look around to see if they’ve shared a slide deck online or email them and ask for their notes. And if, for some rea­son, no help­ful tuto­ri­als exist, read the doc­u­men­ta­tion and pay it for­ward by writ­ing a tuto­r­ial yourself!

StackOverflow is also a great place to read. Most see it as more of a tool to get answers to your ques­tions, but it’s just as good for code-heavy read­ing mate­r­ial. Oftentimes, even with the lan­guages and tools you use all the time, read­ing a new spin on some­thing you thought was a no-brainer is enlightening.

In short

Here’s the deal: pro­gram­ming is writ­ing. And any writer will tell you that you won’t get bet­ter at writ­ing if you aren’t read­ing. So, tell us what you’re read­ing, because we all have room for improvement.