Maybe its just me, but asking this question to HN readers is your answer in itself. I personally can't thin of too many colleagues of mine who read HN, let alone other programming blogs/aggregators (programming.reddit etc).<p>Personally, I read a lot, and write some code. I need to write more code than I read, but its a good start. And a lot of what I read does not have to be necessarily technoloy specific, rather books like "Clean Code" and "Code Complete", Intro To Algorithms etc, patterns, architectures etc.<p>I also tend to read a lot of self-help (GTD), business (Good to Great) and career specific books (Career Intensity) and similar blogs and sites.<p>In my experience, it helps to try and really really practice something. As Bruce Lee once said, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."<p>To give you an example, I am currently reading Clean Code, and one of the pieces of advice is "A method should do one thing, and one thing only". Nothing new there, but normally I do take the time and effort to keep my code short and clean, but this book says that exception handling (in Java) IS ONE thing. So your method should not attempt to do exception handling as well as some other piece of functionality. For the past 3 days at work, I have tried to do that, not because the book says it, but because I did not think of it that way, and I want to give it a whirl before I make my mind up.<p>A lot of people I know don't read, and even those who do, don't practice it. If you want to grow - learn, practice, measure, then either accept it, or throw it away.<p>Update - Other HN readers have other pieces of advice that I did not add here. But working sample projects, reading documentation, tutorials online (I refer to them as the magazine version of tech books :D) all help