Twelve Tips to Master Programming Faster

And in a similar vein, Steve Yegge's post on practicing programming: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/practicing-programming

I think this kind of advice is lacking in a major way: being a good software engineer is not just about being able to write code. Writing code, even 10K hours worth of code, does not make you a good software engineer, unless you also practice how to design your software. You should be able to determine when you are violating DRY, what parts of your program should be separated by a clean internal API and how to separate responsibilities.

Programming, as outlined by guidelines as in the linked article, is nothing more than being able to write the code that solves a problem. Engineering requires you to be able to organize the code and the machines, networks and other infrastructure required to allow your client to reach your code.

From someone that is 100% self-taught I can say from experience that its more an issue of "you don't know what you don't know. This is the major crux of self-learning. How can google possibly help you if you don't know how to frame the problem or even what terms are involved in whatever it is you want to learn? One example I remember was learning about database optimization; how do I know to search for "normalization" if I don't know what normalization is? So of course getting answers from google is super-fast, but that entails that you know what to search for.

My first experience with "coding" was trying to make a website for my tshirt printing business. I spent literally 12 hours a day for 10 days learning css and html and I loved it. So I coded about 10 pages for my website. Naturally I just copied and pasted the layout and menus and common stuff over and over throughout all pages. Finally on the 11th day, through a random search for something I don't remember, I stumbled upon this concept of "include_once" where you could create your website in this "templated" style. You just put "include_once(header)" and then includ_once(footer) and you didn't need to constantly duplicate everything. But it was in some language called php so that entailed that i start googling "php" ...

So you see, a 5 minute talk with a guy that knew about coding websites could have quickly briefed me about the differences between client-side and server-side languages, and why and how to use them. Could have told me to start with a framework like kohana rather than write spahgetti-rific code for the first 3 years of my coding hobby. Could have told me about using things like jquery for quick js development (and why and how js is appropriate). Yes yes, expert "crash courses" are definitely valuable.

Note: I tend to disagree with the term "self-taught". Plenty of people have taught me, it just has not been in a classroom environment. I have learned endlessly from the great teachers that write books, code open-source and take the time out to answer forum posts- so I'm not self-taught, its more like self-motivated.

mmh!!

Mostly good advice, but the 10,000-hours-until-you're-an-expert meme bothers me. First, not everything is equally difficult. Playing the violin is harder than knitting.

Also, being an expert programmer suggests that you've levelled out, that you've reached a permanent high plateau. There is no plateau. It's a slope all the way to infinity.

If you find you've reached a plateau, shift gears and change to a more abstract programming language.

I'm at 30,000 hours, and I'm not an expert programmer. I'm still learning every day, and I like it!