There was an article in the Boston Globe recently by Scott Kirshner: Staying Competitive in the Workplace that emphasized the importance of keeping your skills up to date . It's a short article and worth a read. Some of the activities Kirshner suggests are similar to those Atul Gawande makes in the appendix of his book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance 
Related to this theme is a New Yorker article by Gawande, Personal Best , on the advantages of challenges of engaging someone to coach you in your profession. I continue to be amazed at how much I'm learning from Gawande, a surgeon, about how to be a better software engineer. I suspect that I first realized this when I started learning about Patterns. (The short post, The Pattern Technology of Alexander by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros discusses how an architect influences the software development community.)
Christopher
Maybe the common theme of all these writings is that it's important to be ready to learn, and you can learn from the people you least expect to.
About the author
Steve Berczuk is an engineer and ScrumMaster at Humedica where he's helping to build next-generation SaaS-based clinical informatics applications. The author of Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, he is a recognized expert in software configuration management and agile software development. Steve is passionate about helping teams work effectively to produce quality software. He has an M.S. in operations research from Stanford University and an S.B. in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and is a certified, practicing ScrumMaster. Contact Steve at steve@berczuk.com or visit berczuk.com and follow his blog at blog.berczuk.com.
