Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

Novice: Keep the scope small. Try not to get confused. Concentrate on small successes and learning the basic "rules".

Beginner: After building a base, branch out and expose yourself to areas where the "rules" are different.

Intermediate: You have a base and you also have some idea that there is more to the world than your base. Write a lot of code. No, really a lot. Read a lot of code -- twice as much as you write. Become an "expert" in an area and create an understanding of why the "rules" are the way they are.

Advanced: You are an expert at something, but you realize that you have only scratched the surface. Question all the "rules". Throw them away. Make new ones. Explore the world searching for abstractions that you missed before. Write a ridiculous amount of code. No, I mean epic amounts. Read 4 times as much code as you write. (My negative alter-ego adds: Despair as you realize that you aren't so much looking for a needle in a haystack as a needle in a dung heap. Despair even more when you realize that the dung heap was made by you).

Novice Again: You have mastered a few subjects. You have rewritten the rules. You now have reached a state where you can clearly see that you understand nothing of consequence. Keep the scope small. Try not to get confused. Concentrate on small successes and learning the basic "rules".

Note that it may take a lifetime to reach the final stage and I would say that the vast majority of programmers don't reach it. Scale your expectations accordingly.

Finally, to comment on your question about whether your should review your Coursera course or dive deeper in your Python / Django stack: Write a lot of code. Doesn't matter what. Hey, how about implementing something in Python on the topic of your Coursera course? But not a toy -- write at least 10,000 lines.

In the beginning, everything is new and it can be overwhelming. Humbleness and discipline or dedication is required in the beginning. Small successes lead to pride and enthusiasm, and gradually, over years, your skills grow. In playing guitar and glassblowing, i recall various times where I was satisfied and or pleased with my skills, and then looked back at those times years later and was amazed by how much more sophisticated my skills have become.

With that experience, I never felt frustrated learning Python, JavaScript or SQL because the process reminded me of my previous learning experiences and I knew then all I needed to do was put in time and seek information.

As an aside, I might note that there are mathematical aspects to creating, playing it and even appreciating music. Every system of music has rhythm and a set of tones that is based in someway on numbers – the 12 notes of the western octave, time signatures, 8th and 32nd notes and so forth. Learning the complex relationships of systems like jazz chords on the guitar or piano is very much a mental exercise as well as a physical one.

The risk of expanding laterally is that you can pretty much surf on a fairly clean wave of documentation, examples, tutorials, SO q&a and github code to solve most of the "problems" you face (and many of these "problems" are shit like "learning an API" or "gotcha config files"). This isn't to say that this is how expanding laterally will work in every case, especially when you're picking up a lot of knew paradigms.

The upside to expanding vertically is that you're eventually going to run into problems or questions that you can't just research your way out of. Not to denigrate all of the other learning we do, but I think these times when we have to go out into the wilderness and test ourselves against problems that, even if only by dearth of documentation, are effectively novel, are when a lot of growth happens.

Of course, it's perfectly possible to work in one domain and never have to really stretch yourself. It's also possible to be perpetually expanding laterally into technology so new that you spend more time testing yourself in the wild than many who go "deep" on more thoroughly-trodded ground.

For some people, that means learning to write really tight low-level code for tiny hardware. For others, incorporating more advanced mathematical constructs. And for a third group, learning how to design a certain category of applications really well.

To round yourself out means not to stay within your comfort zone, but to attack the missing parts as well so that even if you aren't a master at those, you have working knowledge. This is also familiar to those who have studied drawing or playing musical instruments - there are many cases where you can get by with what you already know, but would do better if you took the time to study a technique in detail.

When Hickey says "you reset from zero" by only doing new things, he's specifically referring to repetitively relearning basic tasks in software development. That's the stuff that you're guided into looking at constantly because there are slick presentations and hypemen trying to get you to pick up their tool, and their tool has to look easier(i.e. more basic) than the other tool because that's the only way you'll pay attention to it.

If your approach involves something that is kind of challenging that you build from scratch, with new domain problems, that is a Good Thing and you'll surely get something out of it.