I used to get out of bed half an hour before I set off for work. Now I get up two hours before I set off for work, have some breakfast and do some learning. I think it's helped me to have a set period of time where I study/practice/tinker each day. It means I don't feel guilty about "wasting" my evenings as well.
Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
51–60 of 92 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#52when you have a problem. first solve it yourself. get practical experience and make errors. then read about how other people solved it. make a better solution. write a blog post about it. share your code. argument on forums. teach it to others.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#53What makes you think that you are not improving? Programming is a craft where you can make pretty things with old tools as well as new. Do you feel your code works less well, or achieves less than the ones you 're comparing to? Or are you just anxious because you skip learning the newer trends?
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#54Adderall.
I'm upvoting it because it's incredibly common in high schools and college. People have to do tons of repetitive, boring stuff. They have piles of work. Many turn to Adderall to stay focused enough to get it done. Like it or not, it's how a huge chunk of people in college "keep improving" despite the challenges they face not getting better over time.
> People have to do tons of repetitive, boring stuff.
A good programmer will automate this stuff and will not bother with it again. Maybe aderall is incentivizing the wrong behavior here.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#55Adderall.
I'm upvoting it because it's incredibly common in high schools and college. People have to do tons of repetitive, boring stuff. They have piles of work. Many turn to Adderall to stay focused enough to get it done. Like it or not, it's how a huge chunk of people in college "keep improving" despite the challenges they face not getting better over time.
I'm not sure that's great advice. Adderall provides a temporary boost but it takes a lot out of you too. Kicking it becomes difficult because you don't think you can be productive or even intelligent without it. This account [1] of a person who got addicted in college and tried for years to kick it convinced me not to try it.
Please think twice before recommending or endorsing any kind of pharmaceutical product.
[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/generation-addera...
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#56Here some ideas that worked for me:
- online classes. Especially those from actual universities rather than Coursera. Coursera is great but often they target a larger audience and the content may be simplified. Personally, I learned a lot from MIT classes (especially distributed systems and operating systems). They have projects that are challenging and really interesting.
- Competitive programming. I found competition in general to be a great way to improve. It's stimulating and there are many resources available. The downside is that it's hard and can be depressing. For instance, it takes me 10 hours to solve the problems in an easy code jam round when some 18 year kids solve them in an hour. Depending on what you want to learn, there are different type of competition. For instance, code jam / codeforces for shorter type of problems. Google hashcode for slightly larger optimization problems. Kaggle for machine learning. I'm sure there are many others.
Actually, learning stuff and improving is the easy part (you just need free time). There are so many resources. The question is more deciding what to learn, and how can it be useful.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#571. You need to recognize when you're not learning, for one thing. If it's easy, you're not learning. You need to push yourself into the zone of discomfort, where you feel clumsy and have a hard time. Now you're learning. 2. Find a mentor. Lacking that, find e.g. talk of someone explaining some hard techniques and then try to follow the advice. Even and especially if it feels clumsy at first. (More on those two here:…
Upvoted for "Learn how to learn", awesome talk.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#58What i found out is that i rarely take the time to lern something in depth because i mostly learn stuff to use it and tutorials seem to move at a way to slow pace, so i mostly skip them... i started out with C/C++ development but am unable to keep up with the new standards. I see people write really nice code but whenever i sit down i just keep reusing what i know.
Is this such a bad thing? Maybe I'm just trying to justify my own lack of motivation, but I've never been able to learn anything related to programming, or computers in general, unless I had a reason to. The times that I've learned something have been when there was a tangible goal, or I was working on some personal project that I was interested in.
So I guess if you want that boiled down into a (highly inelegant) technique, it would be: have some personal project that you want to do and stumble through it; by the end you'll have learned a bunch of new stuff. Note: I wouldn't recommend doing this in a professional or safety-critical context...
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#59I work on progressively larger and larger apps. This teaches me more and more about coding in the large, in a very practical sense. Every time I learn about something new, my learning is explicitly motivated by the problems that I ran into while implementing the large app. I started by making a reasonably conplex TODO app, which took a few months. This taught me about the importance of declarative (popularized by Rea…
Do you mind sharing your vim extension? Would love to check that out. My coworker is interested in learning vim and he uses VS Code, so it sounds like a good introduction.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep improving?
#60By learning things in-depth and by having the attention-span and learning-wisdom to not skip slow-seeming basic tutorials.