Hello.

I am a programmer who is 35 years old, and not satisfied with my current skill level, my productivity, my salary, and my reputation at my workplace. There is a huge scope for improvement. I have decided to address this now, and will be working hard to become a better and more valued developer than I currently am.

At the beginning of my career, I used to be one of the most valued young programmers in my company, a large I.T. services company based in India. However, 12 years on, I’m struggling to keep up. Many younger developers at my company have broader knowledge than me, get things done faster, and are more trusted and more highly regarded by the management. Ideally, I should have been experienced and skilled enough to be a software architect by now, but I’m still far behind that. By Indian standards, I would probably be considered a senior programmer, but by what I understand of standards in the western world, I would be considered an intermediate-level programmer.

I have the talent to be much better. I am reasonably intelligent, and can learn most concepts quickly. What holds me back is my habit of procrastination, and my lack of focus on what I should be learning, and maybe indecision about what I really want to be and to do in my career. Also, I feel that I am weak in some core technical concepts, such as networking.

On this blog I will be writing about what I am doing to become better. It should help me think more clearly. And may be, once in a while I might happen to write something which you, the reader, would find useful.

Thanks.

-Rohit