how to stay current

It's hard to put in extra hours outside of work, studying and practicing to get better at my job. I've become kind of rusty.

Here's one trick that helps. I skim technology articles and keep an eye out for an unfamiliar term. I keep track of the terms on a whiteboard, and research them when I have time, maybe read the wiki page about it. I can do this while eating breakfast, two birds with one stone.

It has been helpful in building up my jargon vocabulary, which hopefully will make me sound more confident and authoritative. Or at least help me understand wtf an interviewer is asking about.

Here are some items from my whiteboard:

• common closure principle Your classes should never change. But sometimes they have to. In those cases, your system should be designed so that related changes will only affect classes within the same package.
• command patterns
• runtime weaving
• dynamic proxies