If you are coding at all outside of work you will have code to look back at.

The question is:

Are you improving? Or are you beyond improvement?

Six months? I come in after the weekend and constantly want to rewrite the whole goddamn thing.

This^ and I'm only a student; I'll write a program in the evening and by the following morning I'm all, no, no, no!

I tend to spend a lot of time planning (almost as much as coding). I do tend to notice big changes over a period of 2-3 years but areas where I can notice improvements in say six months.

I think I spend too much time planning and not enough time just getting shit done. It's one of the things that I feel like I have to work on this year.

I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing. I spend a lot of time planning because I find my coding productivity is higher. Often it's better to let problems sit for a bit than to code then first, or if one does a mock-up it is an exploration that is part of the planning, to be discarded and done right a second time.

But what this means is I rarely come in the next week and wonder what I was thinking (it does happen, but rarely). More often I look at things, over a few months figure out better solutions to coding problems and my style changes accordingly.

That's good, but the rate slows down over time.

I look at stuff I wrote 3 months ago with horror.

Then again I started learning ios programming then so I might have a bias/reason for it. >.<