Want to be a top developer? You should build things

I encourage people to build projects - but taking a checkbox approach to technology can be more busywork than educational.

Some people might view building an Instagram clone as a fun and exciting challenge, or a great way to prove your worth. I view it as a waste of time. At the end of it all, all the time I invest into creating a clone will be basically a waste. I won't use it and other people won't use it or even see it. Maybe you do learn about Grid layouts from the work, for example. For me, that's not enough.

Instead, my advice to be a top developer: have problems, and solve them - or at least try to.

I am currently tinkering with machine learning via tensorflow, because I need to classify a bunch of playing card images for a sorting machine. I would not normally give two hoots about anything Machine Learning, but with a real problem to solve I am keenly interested.