Ask HN: How do I test that I'm improving as a software developer?

(a) contributing to open source projects. long term disciplined approach, takes time to get evaluation (b) ship a real product. too many environmental parameters, takes time to get evaluated (c) participate in coding competitions. These tend to test your algorithm chops, and less of system design. But accurate results. (d) be generous about recruiter requests. show up for interviews without doing much interview prep (like practicing problems cracking coding interviews). but quick and fast evaluation. This gets very hard when you don't work remotely. (e) exact opposite to (d). be picky about interviews, prepare a lot for an interview. (f) attend conferences, hackathons. time consuming and may be costly and not sure how effective it is. (g) read some classic cs books cover to cover. no accurate measure What do you do regularly to evaluate if you are getting better?