Meet Jeremy
There's only one way to become a better programmer. Write code.
Jeremy tells us that it took a few years for him to realize this. Until coming to that realization, he spent much of his time playing video games, reading about fancy programming techniques, and wishing he could be an accomplished programmer.
It took an information diet, spurred by The Four Hour Work Week, to get Jeremy off his constant Reddit, RSS, and video game dopamine drip. He started first with the iPad, creating No Dice, an app to help players of Magic the Gathering track their gameplay. Then, after escaping a behind-vault-doors government job, he began building small projects with Ruby. He created Showbot, an open-source IRC bot for the 5by5 podcasting network. The bot was a big enough hit that it became overloaded from requests, so he built a website to make getting information from the bot easier.
While writing web applications, Jeremy developed an interest in the Vim text editor. His fascination grew into an obsession. The rest of the Sparkbox crew can confirm this. It's creepy, actually. His Vim configuration has become his most popular GitHub repository, containing over fifty plugins and hundreds of lines of customization.
Jeremy continues to build web applications in his spare time. His current frameworks of choice are Ember.js and Rails, and you can see all of his projects on his GitHub page. You can also follow him on Twitter.