Growth

When you have been a developer / programmer / software engineer for several years it can feel like you have a great grasp of your tools and languages. You only realize what you don't know when you change tools, try a new library, or change languages.

The same can be said for almost every career and profession in the world. You could be a mechanic that works on cars every day for 30 years and then a new 2022 vehicle comes out with a feature you've never seen before, time to learn 1% more!

There is always room to learn more in your existing tools, libraries, frameworks, and languages. There is where the 1% rule comes into place.

The 1% Rule

The 1% rule challenges you to take something that you already know, and learn 1% more about it.

Resources?

The resource itself doesn't matter. You can use books, social media, blog posts such as this one, MDN, YouTube, a colleague, a professor, literally anything! The only requirement is that you learn something that you did not know before!

How do you quantify 1%?

I quantify the 1% as knowing something more this week than I knew the previous week. For example, with JavaScript you can make an object immutable using Freeze. If you didn't know this before you read this post then you are already 1% better than you were last week. It's a gradual gain of knowledge or skills

Example using CSS

Let's say you feel confident in your CSS skills and use CSS every day in your front end dev role. Pick an area of CSS you don't use often and learn about it, well enough that you could tell a colleague or coworker about it and they would understand it as well.

Example using JavaScript

You have been a JavaScript developer for years, you have been using it in some form or another every day. There have been many changes and developments in JavaScript since you first learned about it, for example String.matchAll() is a recent addition to the language that wasn't possible until just a couple years ago. Pick one topic or area of interest and learn about it. Then share that knowledge with colleagues, friends, or your social media audience!

Share what you learn

When you share new things you learn, you are literally teaching other people! There are millions of people on Twitter, several of them are just getting started on their journey. Whether you are 1 step, 1,000 steps, or 1,000,000 steps into your coding journey, you can still learn 1% more!

Challenge

Spend time every single week educating yourself or improving by 1% in areas of your life that you care about. It's as easy as reading an article, a blog post, watching a YouTube video, or talking to a friend.