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Resolve to improve your SAS programming skills

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Happy New Year to you, your families, and your colleagues!

This is the time of year when people make all types of New Year's resolutions. According to the USA.Gov web site, the most popular resolutions are:

  1. Lose Weight
  2. Volunteer to Help Others
  3. Quit Smoking
  4. Get a Better Education
  5. Get a Better Job
  6. Save Money
  7. Get Fit
  8. Eat Healthy Food
  9. Manage Stress
  10. Manage Debt
  11. Take a Trip
  12. Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
  13. Drink Less Alcohol

And, these resolutions all make sense because they promote personal growth. It is a new year, so why not start making the changes that you want to carry forward throughout the year?

Along with personal changes, perhaps it is also time to consider what changes you could make to improve your SAS programming skills. There is no "most popular list of SAS resolutions" for us to reference, so I will suggest some:

  1. Lose unnecessary variables and observations when inputting data sets
  2. Volunteer to help junior SAS programmers
  3. Quit writing programs without comments in them
  4. Get a better understanding of the intricacies of PROC SQL
  5. Get more sophisticated in your SAS Macro programming
  6. Save time by re-purposing your old programs
  7. Purchase some interesting SAS Press books... and read them
  8. Join a local SAS users group and attend meetings
  9. Get better at using the Output Delivery System
  10. Take a SAS class
  11. Write a technical paper for SAS Global Forum
  12. Reduce processing time by writing more efficient programs
  13. Subscribe to the SAS communities discussion groups on support.sas.com

Hardly a comprehensive list, but definitely a good start, no? And, I would bet that one or more of these resolutions resonate with you; that they are things you have been wanting to do, but have not quite found the time to work on in 2014. Well, there are 360 more days of 2015 just waiting for you to dig into your own SAS resolutions.

Of course, you could simply sit back and do the same old, same old. But, how could you continue to achieve personal growth as a SAS programming professional if you did that?

Meet the new year; same as the old year--Oh, we really think not!

Tags How to Become a Top SAS Programmer professional development sas author sas programming sas tip sas user
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About Author

Michael A. Raithel

Senior systems analyst for Westat and SAS Press author

Michael A. Raithel is a senior systems analyst for Westat, an employee-owned contract research organization in the Washington, DC area. An internationally recognized expert in the use of SAS software in mainframe and UNIX environments, he is the author of over 25 SAS technical papers and is a popular lecturer at SAS Global Forum and at regional SAS conferences. He has written four books for SAS; the most recent book is How to Become a Top SAS Programmer. A copy of the first edition Tuning SAS Applications in the MVS Environment, resides in the Smithsonian Institution of American History’s Permanent Research Collection of Information Technology.

4 Comments

  2. Pingback: SAS timer – the key to writing efficient SAS code - SAS Users

  3. Thomas Billings on

    11.Write a technical paper for SAS Global Forum

    This is a great idea but it is too late to submit for 2015 SGF and 2016 SGF is a long way in the future. However, it's not too late to submit to some of the 2015 regional SAS User Groups conferences (e.g., WUSS and others), and I would encourage anyone interested in writing a SAS-related paper to submit papers to, and attend, their regional conferences.

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