Asking questions on code reviews is one of the most powerful tools to learn more about a codebase, and fostering a culture where junior devs feel empowered to ask questions is one of the best ways to help junior devs succeed.
I've really enjoyed writing blog posts recently. Not only is it a great way to flex your writing muscles, but writing about a topic, unsurprisingly, helps you understand that topic better too. I've had great conversations with friends about the posts I've written as well.
And sort of in that same vein, I've been developing my own static site generator that I eventually want to move my blog to. It's almost certainly going to be a worse SSG than every alternative, but it'll be mine and that's worth something in itself.
Plus it's just been fun to make! I wrote some gnarly code to generate infinitely nestable layouts that I'm kind of proud of. It's the kind of code that's really cool but you can only code on a project for yourself, because if someone else had to debug it, they might say some pretty unkind things about you.
I agree with you about writing. Back in 2020, I made a commitment to study a CS or math topic in detail each week and then write an essay about it. Those were some of my best learning experiences and when I look back at those essays, they are pure gold.
Something I really hope Gleam figures out is a way to streamline the Elm architecture. We see the Elm architecture mostly in web apps, but I think that model is a really good idea for a lot of applications!
But I think two things really hold it back:
* it's verbose.
* they compose awkwardly.
Neither of these are showstoppers, but I think fixing these problems--maybe with something like syntax-level support--could really lead to a beautiful programming language.
Asking questions on code reviews is one of the most powerful tools to learn more about a codebase, and fostering a culture where junior devs feel empowered to ask questions is one of the best ways to help junior devs succeed.