Mastering music (drums), and software development require a lot of dedication, both on reading and practicing.

In music, the first thing I did when I decided to take it seriously was to look for a music school to learn how to read and interpret music. Then I read most of the books related to drum techniques and rhythms, attended workshops, spent nights and weekends practicing to improve my ability and velocity. Practicing is very important! It’s when you give yourself the chance to commit mistakes and to let all the ugliness to happen; after all, no one is watching you. The intention is not to sound good, but to stretch your limits, so that you can perform perfectly on the stage.

In software development, it’s pretty much the same, you have to read a lot (books, blogs, articles, magazines), learn programming languages (choose two or three to specialise, and get a higher overview of others), attend workshops, meet people, practice by trying and evaluating different technologies, creating a blog to post your experiences, joining open-source projects, registering for coding competitions, solving some of the CodeKata challenges, preferably pairing with someone else, in summary, stretch your limits!!!! (Have you seen this before? ☺) Doing so will give you more self-confidence for you to perform well during your show, at client site.