I didn’t put the minutes up from last week because we had too many people there and we didn’t get a real group conversation going.. It was mostly little separated groups so I don’t really know what has been talked about. I also have a deadline for a client rapidly approaching so I didn’t really find the time to add this to my blog.
But I would like to thank everybody that was there last week for attending.
Anyway today we had another Geek lunch and the topic of discussion was:
What will you do to become a better programmer this year ?
I’ll sum up the list of things to do that we all agreed upon.
1. Take an advanced reading course to improve your reading speed. People make a couple of really common mistakes when reading stuff and this course unlearns them. It improves your reading speed up to 3 times.. The course only takes 4 mornings so it’s definitely something I’ll be doing in the near future.
2. Read a new book every month/ 2months.
3. Take an advanced writing course in order to write that dreaded documentation a lot faster.
4. Learn a new language every year. By taking a quick poll around the table it seemed that the most likely candidates here are Smalltalk, Ruby, Errlang, …
5. Contribute to open source that way you get to meet a lot of good coders and you learn sooo much.
6. Get a membership with ACM they give you free books and courses if you’re a member.
7. Work with as much people and on as many projects as possible in order to gain more experience ==> See open source 
I want to thank everybody for coming and making this lunch another great one
I doubt anyone should look at Errlang, it sounds like it’s full of errors. However, my copy of “Programming Erlang” arrived yesterday.
:p
The Reading course that I’ve completed was presented by Write Group (www.write.co.nz).
The link to the course itself is: http://www.write.co.nz/mainsite/ImprovedReadingCentre.html.
My reading speed increased 2.9x – some on the course increased 4x.
“Take an advanced writing course in order to write that dreaded documentation a lot faster.”
Most developers need to learn to write *clearly*, and should take a course that teaches that, not speed.