Comment design or implementation? (Score 1) 240
If you want to get better at writing correct code quickly, I recommend TopCoder. I spent enough years doing ACM and TopCoder competitions that a lot of techniques have become mechanical, and I no longer have to think hard about them to get the details right. (Perhaps I could have achieved the same effect more easily if I used higher-level languages, but I like to work on performance-sensitive problems which require mutable memory and lots of system calls.)
If you want to design large software systems or create interfaces meant for use by other programmers, I'm less sure what advice to give. Try to get some exposure to different languages or library interfaces and figure out why programmers might like or dislike them, what might be error-prone about them, what affects ease of extension, how to hide unimportant details and allow a diversity of implementations, etc. Look at some time-tested interfaces, eg unix files or windows message queues. Try to understand what problems they solve, how they could be improved, and some of the trade-offs the designer might have considered.
If you want to design large software systems or create interfaces meant for use by other programmers, I'm less sure what advice to give. Try to get some exposure to different languages or library interfaces and figure out why programmers might like or dislike them, what might be error-prone about them, what affects ease of extension, how to hide unimportant details and allow a diversity of implementations, etc. Look at some time-tested interfaces, eg unix files or windows message queues. Try to understand what problems they solve, how they could be improved, and some of the trade-offs the designer might have considered.
