A conclusion I came to after years of watching software projects come and go, is that one of the biggest differences between teams who achieve consistent success and those who suffer through inconsistency is their commitment to continuous learning. Successful athletes continuously practice the fundamentals while learning more advanced strategies. Same should happen with developers.

Here at WyeWorks we strongly believe that curiosity and passion for learning are key to being a good developer. If you have people on your team who are curious and collaborative like we do, continuous learning comes naturally and performance will be high.

Either it is to share a tip, research a new technology, play around with that library that was on top of the head for weeks, or even watch someone’s keynote, people gather the entire morning at what we call Technical Thursdays with the same goal in mind: share and acquire knowledge.

Recently, a developer with no more than 10 days at the company (who was also new to Ruby) was able to get his first contribution to OSS accepted after fixing a bug encountered when playing around with a gem we were discussing. Everything happened that same morning: the learning on how to use the gem, the bug discovery, the teamwork to fix it, and finally the contribution to open source.

Here are a few pics of WyeWorkers at our Technical Thursdays

So technical Thursdays is part of what we do in order to improve and stay up to date. What are you doing as a developer in order to maintain up to date and continue learning? Please share!