#Introduction
I think to become a better developer you have to continuously sharpen your saw. For me this means going to meetups, reading technology books, learning new programming languages, watching instructional videos and performing code katas.
#Code katas
Code Kata is a term coined by Dave Thomas, co-author of the book The Pragmatic Programmer, in a bow to the Japanese concept of kata in the martial arts. Code katas are small coding excercises that help you get better at coding. For me it is not the actual solving a problem with code but more getting better at using my development environment.
The video below shows me performing the String Calculator code kata from Roy Osherove. I think this is a good code kata to start with if you want to start performing katas. I am implementing the string calculator code kata in C# using Visual Studio 2013 and the MSTest framework for unit tests. I make use of Resharper to increase my productivity in Visual Studio.
The music is from Rob Costlow
Another way to improve you skills is using using CodeWars which is a site that hosts several code katas which you can perform online. The site collects statistics and rewards.