A strange path in development

During the time I've being a software developer there are many things that I noticed in my personal growth as a programmer, I can quickly list the following phases/periods:

• Beginner: You do have notions for programming, but write awful code.
• User: You start writting better code, you also see your previous mistakes.
• Experienced: You know the ground, and you are comfortable with it.

And the interesting thing about these phases is that are technology/language/paradigm based. What I mean with this is that you cycle through these phases every time you learn something new (at least in programming, in my personal case).

First I learned structured programming, then object-oriented programming, then aspect-oriented programming, then functional-programming, then DCI. All of them in a different set of technologies and tools that completely changed what I thought I knew about programming. This is a learning pattern of mine that I know it works, every time I try to learn something new I know that these phases are going to be in the way.

I kind of know now how I learn, and I can do something about it. Now it's simpler to learn something new, and at the moment this new thing is LISP via Clojure, not sure what is gonna happen, but I can tell you that my brain is breaking old rules every week.

I think that's the message for this post, know how you learn, then kick the shit out of your brain.