The answer is simple but most of the programmer forget this thing, The Basics . I will take an example of myself and other new programmers. We start with C programming, at least most of the programmer does. I can tell about myself, when I started I was fascinated in the beginning, but then I wanted to create more programs with GUI. I wanted to create more apps and all. Things that you can see working. And this is where I was so wrong. Because those basic that we miss like creating logic in any programming language whether its C python or Java. And application development is most easiest thing, but after a time managing the application becomes a challenge but as a programmer. And managing that needs experience. But here we are talking about competitive skills, so I would say stick with the basics. And then there are higher subjects in basics, Algorithms Find problems, that doesn’t exist and then write solutions that doesn’t exist. You can find lots of online problem and take...

Ohk I remember one, we had a product at  Waayoo  and me and  Amit Saini  were working on a nitrogen inflating machine. And Everything was setup, the machine’s embedded part was working, we had a software application written in python, to interface with the embedded part. We did that and it started working fine. But Then we need to make some changes in it, so  Amit Saini  sir started making changes in his side of function. so function was something like this, all we had to do was to check of the value is 0 we will initiate the system and then will change it to to 1 statically, and then that starting function will never run again. And the code goes like this - function initiate(int check){ if(check==0){ startagaint(); check==1; } } That was the code, and this function has to be called several times in the whole process, after a time we got stuck whenever this function called the second time it always keep repeating itself. and we had no idea w...

Believe me or not but this is my area of expertise. You can check my answers on software developments and you would know. I am a good one to answer this question, because I have taught myself programming, I have never even been to school after 10th class, So I know it better. Now Come to the point How can you gain skills like professionals?? Just like the professionals do it in the first place. I will tell the stories of my own to prove my points. Point no. 1 chose a good programing language that suits you I started with C, and initially had no idea how am I gonna develop anything. Because after I compile my code all I could see was cmd that says something I said it to say. No offense to C, but it was not that good for me it can be for you. So after C and java now I use python which I find very easy for development of application on linux and site. I use Java for GUI applications for PC’s and I use PHP for website designing. So you can select different language for di...

As a developer, the most toughest thing that I found was to read other people’s code. And I think if you want to learn quickly and with less harm to your brain work, then read other people’s code. And I think that’s the best thing in programming community, We share our work too much, there are so many open source work, that you can look at. Please write smaller functions So while reading other people’s code, what I find most irritating is when people write larger function, recently I had to find the bug in a project that had more than 50 modules, each modules could have been created easily, but lack of pre-planning or lack of experienced programmer made it worse. There are some functions which 200 lines long. Use loops or separate function to avoid repetition in your code. The person who writes same code again and again is not a proper programmer or not a professional at all. People don’t use loop, instead using their brain to find a short code for a large problem t...