Athletes do it. Musicians do it. Artists do it. How may developers do it? The skills that we use everyday don’t just magically appear. Lots of developers learn and hone these skills by working on real world projects. Is this right? I don’t think so. Companies pay good money to hire us with the expectation that we know what we’re doing in some area. They don’t pay us all this dough so that we can show up and try out some cool new thing on their unsuspecting clients.
Practicing development isn’t easy. You have to come up with problems to solve. Sometimes that’s harder than solving the problems. Insert Billy McCafferty here. He’s creating a challenge every week where you submit your solution to a refactoring problem for the chance of winning a book. Who cares about the book. Billy is creating the problems for you! Solve them. Explore them. Practice with them.