Ask HN: How do you get better at coding?

Do you mind sharing your age? Also, what programming language/s do you code in and what level have you reached? Finally, how did you actually start coding?

Avoid becoming too dependent on referencing easy/fast solutions online when you hit an annoying problem. I've found that it's extremely valuable to go through forced stretches of time where I won't allow myself to do quick solution look-ups using Stackoverflow et al., forcing me to work through more problems and keep improving. There is always some deadline to get some thing done, so it can be extremely tempting to turn to Google to quickly move on to the next problem. I think that's reasonable so long as you mix it up and make sure your skillset is well maintained.

The one thing I've figured out over the years is to not make your goal be "be great at coding". That's an ambiguous goal, and it's easy to move the goalposts on that one. I find that that kind of goal encourages a narrow, syllabus-y definition of learning that doesn't encourage the kind of trial-and-error that's crucial to grokking the difficult parts of programming.

Instead just learn how to solve your actual problems or entertain yourself using programming /today/. Making your friends websites, making games for / with your kids, making an app to water your plants, making spreadsheets to manage your finances, automating that annoying manual thing you do at work, making goofy software that converts images to pixel art, whatever floats your boat.

You have to make a lot of bad things to start making good things. So start making bad things, and enjoy it while you're at it - I've made my fair share.

Do a little bit of programming every day. Do it for now, and not for later. Set yourself a direction every so often, but not much more than that. Review your own work and see what was not great, and figure out what to learn next to make it better. Show your work to other people and ask them for help, or enjoy together. It's much more pleasant to look back later and continually be surprised how far you've come.

By reading (esp. code), writing code, and reviewing (i.e writing about code).

Reading, esp. code (including learning new languages and reading in them), shows me new paradigms, new idioms, new ideas, sometimes parts of new ideas which may click together later. Sometimes the patterns may however be subtle and not easy to notice by pure code reading; in such cases reading free-form prose (blogs/etc.) can help notice them. Also reading code invariably provides examples of bad code, to be remembered as a warning and something to try to avoid.

Writing code introduces need for actually choosing some of the learned approaches, excercises the learned theory, ingrains it, shows the shortcomings and costs of particular patterns/approaches, their nuances, where they fit and where they don't, allows to experiment with them.

"Exchange with coworkers" is usually also reading in my case, i.e. code reviews.

And I just realized that also doing code reviews helps me improve coding in one more way: I sometimes discover stuff when I'm trying to express in words why I find some peer's code jarring, troublesome, or confusing.

Your questionnaire is missing a few important questions (in my opinion). You should ask for the responders current status (student, professional - if so freelance/employed) because this will quite probably color the answers. (Unless everybody will just put "by coding" in the Other section). You should also ask for the number of years of experience, or at least a ballpark. The way one learns changes depending of what you already know.

Edit: and to answer your question. At first I learned by reading other's people code and trying stuff. Adapting existing base bit by bit can go a long way. Back then I had no internet.

At university most of the curriculum was theoretical. We have done very little actual coding and most problems were too small. Often too specific and vague at the same time.

Nowadays I learn by coding. When you re-read your code from a few months back it should look bad, this is the sign that you have progressed. If there are no idiomatic ways of solving a particular problem, I try to find a better way to implement it each new time.

Finally, I try to talk to people smarter or more experienced than me.

If I would change one thing, it would be to do more projects in university and make them follow agile methodology with the teacher as product owner.