How to become a good developer overnight

I get a lot of request from a lot of people who see my works and
get inspired and ask me how can they do the same? The questions I
generally get are following:

• How can I develop projects like you did?
• What do I need to learn in C# to become like you?
• Does Microsoft Certifications help? Should I go for the
  exams?
• What did you do to become MVP? I want to become MVP too.
• I am 23 (or 24), fresh graduate and I want to become like you. What do I need
  to do?

Generally the questions are like this. Everyone asks me for a
“shortcut” way to becoming a really good developer. So, here’s the
magical secret for becoming a really good developer and achieve
everything I have achieved:

Work 16 hours per day, 7 days a week, 360 days a year for
13 years.

Yes! That’s the secret. It’s pretty easy. The only thing you
need to do is “work” and do nothing else and you will achieve
everything that I have achieved. Pretty easy. I did that, so you
can do it too! Piece of cake.

If you want to go for the “long” way then here’re the things you
can try:

• Take part in open source projects or make several yourselve.
  This is the best way to learn really useful things.
• If you can, try setting up your own company. I have setup 3
  companies so far. 2 were not that succesful, 1 is very
  successful. It helped me learn so many things that I would have
  never learnt by working in other’s companies as an employee. The best lessons are learnt from the failures. I learnt a long list of “What not to do in a software development project”, which came very handy when I did my later projects. The more I failed in my earlier projects, the less mistakes I made in my later projects. The key is not to give up even if you fail to deliver 10 projects successfully in a row. Keep an open eye, do a retrospective and find out what made it fail, and especially what *you* did wrong.
• Read articles everyday. There are thousands of articles to read
  from www.codeproject.com and
  msdn.microsoft.com. I use my Pageflakes page www.pageflakes.com/omar to keep in touch with the technology world everyday. I still read almost all the articles that get
  published in codeproject every week. If you read 10 articles per
  week and do it for a year weeks, you have the knowledge
  of 480 articles! Who can beat you then?
• Not only read articles, but try out the attached source codes.
  Make similar projects yourselves and use the ideas presented in the
  articles in your own project. I spend everyday at least 1 hour in
  trying out new technologies. This not only increases my knowledge
  but also makes me more experienced in doing things better and helps
  me do my office work better and faster.
• Get into companies which gives you exciting projects to work on
  and you get to do something in everything. For example, join a
  company which gives you the freedom to design your modules, develop
  it, test it, document it etc. The idea is to gain experience from
  all stages of development. Make sure the company has enough bright
  stars to learn from. If you just become another cow in a big dairy
  farm, no benefit.
• Don’t leave a company if you are underpaid but you do a lot for
  the company. Have patience. Build yourself up and you will one day
  get what you deserve. I used to get $250/mo in my first
  company, which used to do outsourced projects for a really big
  company in US. I worked day and night in that company and worked in
  8 projects in 7 years. I did not leave the company because of
  the technologies I could learn and apply and the variety of things
  I could do there besides just coding. Best of all, I could work on many outsourced
  projects myself from various countries which exposed me to a wide
  variety of technologies, culture, and business. So, when I left the company and
  joined another one, with the vast experience I had gathered from my
  previous underpaid company, my salary became $200/day in the new
  company. See the difference. If I had left earlier seeking higher
  salary instead of technologies, I would not have learned all the
  cool things and I would not become so expensive as I am
  now.
• This is very important for those who cost $200/day now. Don’t
  change yourself once you start earning this much. Be the same
  person as you were when you used to get $200/month. Remember, it
  was the attitude and the burning desire to learn and grow that
  made you become what you are now. If the burning sun inside you
  becomes a dying candle, you lose.
• Don’t start your career in a company where you are given nice
  specs to read on, you have lead developers to decide all
  input/output/pseudocodes, you have a solid QA team to test
  your work, you have managers and administrators to take care of
  every management and administrative issues etc. In such a company,
  the only thing you become is a “smart typist”. You basically
  translate English to C#. The right side of your brain does not
  develop at all. Start your career with small companies which deal
  with lots of challenges and you get the chance to burn your brain
  and fingers out. The sweet smell of your roasted brain is far
  better than the sweet scent of your polished cubicle inside a
  decorated corporate office.
• I have seen the following evolutionary cycle of developers and
  see where you fit in:
• • Beginner: Does not wear shoes, comes to office on sandles.
    Looks very sober. Shirt is outside pant. When you ask them,
    do you know .NET events and delegates? They say, “uh, ummm, no I
    don’t think so. Is it birthday events?”
  • Beginner+: Gives you “I know it all” look whenever you talk
    about programming. Wears shiny shoes, full sleve shirt is
    nicely put inside dockers pants. Back brushed hair wtih
    “Set Wet” gel and always on 300 sunglasses. When you ask them, “do
    you know .NET events and delegates?” They say, “Events and
    delegates are coooool man! You can do anything with them and mark
    my word man, “anything”. I haved used them in sooooo many
    projects. Did you just learn about .NET events and
    delegates?”
  • Intermediate: Clothing turns a bit pale. Sunglass is
    old-school. No hair gel. Anytime you speak about some terms like
    EJB, Spring, Design Patterns, their eyes sparkle like the brightest
    star in the November sky. They start doing a lot of off-the-record
    work inside office. They start going to online groups, start
    working with friends on open source projects, start reading MSDN
    Magazines etc. If you ask them, “Can you make it?” They always
    reply, “Sure, you will get it tomorrow.” But usually you get it
    after a month.
  • Intermediate+: Generally you get it within 1 or 2 weeks overdue
    schedule.
  • Advanced: They wear the same “I am a Geek”
    or “Microsoft Windows XP” logo T-shirts everyday (until it
    stinks and you can smell it as soon as they enter the
    office) and shiny sports shoes. They start talking about
    software development processes, RUP, Extreme Programming,
    Agile Development etc. If you ask them to do something, they
    reply “Give me a functional specification, a technical
    specification, test plans, milestones, release plans, mockups and N
    number of developers and I will get it done.”
  • Very advanced: Does not wear shoes, comes to office on sandles.
    Looks very sober. Shirt is outside pant. When you ask them,
    do you know .NET events and delegates? They say, “They seem to
    suffer from bi-directional strong reference problem which
    prevents garbage collectors from collecting the listener properly
    and the only way to release the reference is to bring down the app
    domain”
• Do take Microsoft Certifications without cheating. You will
  learn a lot.
• Write articles & blogs. Share everything you learn. Someone
  out there will benefit from it someday. Don’t hesitate thinking
  that you don’t know much to write about.