Improving the Old-Fashioned Way (GWTW857)

How do you get better at your craft? Sounds like a potential start to a not so funny joke, but I'm serious: How do you get better at your craft? With skills that rely upon your hands and time—like woodworking or pottery or painting—you just have to do the work, go through the process, and see what comes out the other end. Is it good or is it crap? Probably. But in the digital world, it's a little bit different (or so we tell ourselves), because we can create or buy or borrow systems that indicate when something is broken or going to lead to failure. They can also do a lot of the mundane work for us. As a programmer, you can generate an entire program in seconds of time, shifting your time burden from authorship to editor. But do you actually get better as a programmer? Maybe. Improvement comes in different ways, I guess. But the more I think about getting better at my craft, the less it has to do with what software I'm using or not using, and doing the actual work.