practising what exactly?

I was just reading another of steveyegge's blog posts from 5 or so years ago
http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/practicing-programming
and he's talking about practising-programming, in a similar way to many other blog posts have.

There's one point that is mentioned here, and other places too that I have to disagree with.

...merely doing your job every day doesn't qualify as real practice.

I think it actually depends on what exactly you're practising.
For example, are you practising programming in a language you already know?
If so, you could try different approaches, or libraries or something

One thing I try to 'practise'/study is learning new technologies (or languages).
I take different approaches to learning each new technology, and monitor how easy/hard it is.

I think that counts as practising as much as any deliberate exercise.

I guess it all depends on what your job actually is.
If your job is to pump out as much code as possible, then practising programming itself is probably a good idea.

But I view my job (as a software developer) differently.
For the most part, my job consists of learning a technology or language or program or system that I know nothing about, and configuring or programming or modifying in some way.

The key part is the learning.

I'm practising learning.