Overview

Kaizen is a Japanese term for continuous improvement. There’s a learning curve in programming, and we can always do better. Obviously, there are cases of programmers who appear to peak about five to ten years into their careers, and then they just remain there.

Continuous improvement and mastery of our trade takes some obvious forms:

• Learning a new programming language
• Broadening our skills in a new area of computing
• Building our chops by contributing to an open-source project

These are all great ways to challenge ourselves and keep our skills fresh. However, we can think of kaizen in broader terms.