Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 95 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#2

Post by NayamAmarshe »

I'm building projects to learn new stacks and architectures.

Currently working on Writedown: https://writedown.app - https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/writedown

I wanted to create a note writing app that supports markdown and has sharing capabilities. I usually use a Telegram private channel for saving stuff and writing notes, but Telegram doesn't really support Markdown so I thought it would be a good idea to create something like that.

Writedown is currently a WIP and I'm building in public (doing nothing special, just the repo is public haha)

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#5

Post by a_subsystem »

Building small projects with the small lessons I've been learning.

Studying design patterns and broader concepts - Gang of Four, Bob Fowler, Casey Muratori, Yegor Bugayenko), programming languages (OCaml, php, Java, C), and frameworks (Laravel, Django, Rails).

It's been a long and glorious slog. But it's like learning a language: the more you speak and write, the more you can speak and write.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#6

Post by kitsunesoba »

Who knows if it's a valid approach, but I haven't been too worried with chasing whatever's trending. Instead, I've been following a list of interesting potential projects I've written down. The list spans several platforms and several different types, so this takes me all over the place and should be enough to keep advancement rolling for a long time even if none of those projects ever leave the tinkering stage.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#7

Post by symkat »

I’ve been working on building a web hosting platform.

https://github.com/symkat/MyJekyllBlog - It’s centered around hosting Jekyll blogs. It supports having paid user accounts (Stripe), building sites (uses podman containers), deploying built sites to web servers, obtaining SSL certificates for the sites it hosts.

It’s been really fun to work on.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#9

Post by mattbgates »

With every project, I'm always learning something new. I went from building projects with dozens of files to less than 10 and try to keep it to just a single page. I went from spending months on projects to spending no more than a month on a single project, sometimes taking up to just two weeks to complete. I think it's the lessons of sticking to the logic and getting straight to the point with programming.

If there was anyone who helped me become a better programmer, it was my first tyrant boss, who was a complete asshole. I adopted his practices: write out what you want your program to do. What is its purpose? What does it do? How does it operate? Who will use it? Why? What will they pay for it? What will it look like? What pages will it have? Does it need these pages? And a bunch of other questions. It really helps to save a ton of time and keep you on focus.

He said to me: "You waste more time jumping into a program without direction than one where you spend a weekend just outlining what your program should actually do."

Really great advice that helped me write many programs.

Post reply on HN