Expanding your skills means keeping up with what's going on in the software development world, both in relation to iOS/watchOS coding and to broader development topics. It is essential to take time away from coding in order to prevent your knowledge from becoming out of date, but the spike in motivation you get from learning what's going on may prove just as valuable.
Read the blogs, subscribe to the newsletters. Not all of them perhaps, but those that seem most relevant or interesting (a list that will evolve with time, of course). Many of the ideas that will shape your growth as a developer are out there, just waiting to be discovered, but you won't find them by exclusively writing code; you need to proactively seek out new topics of value to you.
Use the many internet forums out there not just for problem solving, but also as a way to keep up with issues that are affecting developers of all platforms, in all locations. Many concepts of which you are not yet aware will trickle into your mental model of the programming landscape and the value of this cannot be overstated.
Publish and be damned, the saying goes, but the truth of open sourcing is very different. Creating a basic GitHub or BitBucket account costs nothing more than a few few minutes of the usual password creation and, once that's done, you can create a new public repository, to which you can upload any code (or anything else, for that matter) which, for any reason at all, is worth sharing.
Alone the discipline instilled by the knowledge that someone else will be able to read your code is worth the effort of preparing at least some small code fragments for publication to your repository.
And then what can happen? One of the following, most likely:
- Nobody ever reads it, but you cleaned it up and put it up there, so the time was well spent. Somebody might read it next week.
- Someone reads it, thinks it's great and downloads it for use in their own projects. Fantastic, you've made a contribution to the wider community and somebody somewhere thinks you're the bee's knees.
- Someone recommends your repo or links to it from somewhere and suddenly a thousand people have read it.
- Someone reads it and has a suggestion for improvement. This might be the best possible scenario; you are learning something, your contribution to the community is improving in quality, and you have made a valuable contact online.
- Someone reads it, shrugs her shoulders, and moves on. You have lost nothing, you'll never even know, and all the above scenarios are still open.
You have nothing to lose. Don't be overly modest, either. However small your contribution, someone somewhere will be interested in it, you'll have broken the ice, and started to attain a level of comfort with open sourcing and repo's in general. Nothing is up there forever (it's not Facebook), you can delete repo's later if you have something better, or if you feel they're no longer relevant.
If job interviews are part of your master plan, you'll be glad to have built up even a small collection of published code.
You may be fortunate enough to be surrounded by like-minded souls who will happily talk programming with you for hours and days on end, or you may be the only person you know who cares what a compiler is and what it's good for, but, either way, it's a good idea to meet other developers face to face, offline, in a real physical room somewhere. However valuable online exchanges may be, there is no substitute for the wandering, unfocussed, random course that live conversation with a live human being takes. If one stops to consider how many life-changing events come about through some casual mention of something in passing, it becomes clear that it really is worth the effort of leaving the desk and arranging real meet-ups.
If you haven't done so already, check out the Meet-Ups website for a developer group somewhere in your vicinity:
If you can't find one (you can guess what's coming now, I imagine), start one! Even if there are just two of you, most of the benefits of live encounters with someone who shares at least some of your programming interests don't depend on how many of you there are. Don't necessarily restrict yourself to iOS or Apple gadget groups, there may be cross-platform groups that are at least as valuable to you as a developer, in terms of knowledge shared, networking, and the shear motivational benefits of a shared passion for software development.
One step up from Meet Ups are the developers' conferences, great and small, that are taking place all over the world, all of the time. Visiting WWDC in San Francisco may exceed your budget (it certainly exceeds mine), but a search of the web will reveal the nearest dev conferences to wherever you live.
The potential benefits of meeting so many other developers in a short (typically one or two days) intensive burst of presentations, talks, discussion groups, and ad hoc conversation over a pizza are too many to list, and too valuable to pass up. Most of them are not expensive, though you may have to factor in accommodation and travel costs.
And if you can't find one near you (you knew this was coming), arrange one! For all you know, you may find yourself in a hitherto unimagined statistical cluster of developers that would like nothing more than a day or two of exchanging ideas, and phone numbers, and GitHub URL's, over a coffee and a pizza. It's always pizza, don't ask why. Somewhere near you is a local community center that will be happy to put a room at your disposal for an affordable fee and you get to add DevCon Organizer to your CV and LinkedIn profile. You'll be amazed at the difference that makes.