I try to factor in a decent amount of yak shaving time when I make estimates. Hitting deadlines is all well and good, but there's nothing like a good yak shave.
A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
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Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#12Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#13The article has a pretty good point. I might add that a potentially better way to improve your speed/effectiveness is to deliberately take time to regularly sharpen the saw. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/sharpening-the-saw....
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#14Sad but true. I learnt early and forget daily that you should seek to understand the problem by working back from any solution you can find. There's so much to not understand!
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#15If you want to become a stupid code-hammering monkey then this is EXACTLY how you should proceed.
Procrastination, the good one, is actually the key to broaden your horizon and gain knowledge. It may slow down your work, but i would always prefer such colleagues over the kind described in the article.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#16Another side of this is time estimates. If you have done the exact thing you are estimating, or something close to it, your estimate is only off by a factor of 2. If you are estimating something you've never done, the estimate is off by a factor of 10. While I really hate the title of the article, I agree with the point wholeheartedly. It is much faster to deliver something where you know all the issues and have expe…
The concept you propose is revealing. If I consistently underestimate the amount of time a project will take by a factor of 10, improvements in accuracy of my estimates (boring product management details) can be interpreted as becoming a "faster" programmer (desired personal development outcome).
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#17Ummmmmm...ASBOLUTELY NO! Terrible advice that will stagnate your development as a developer. You need to learn faster and better ways of doing things ALL THE TIME. That is how you become a faster developer. But being a faster developer shouldn't be your concern, being a better developer should.
Based on this guys advice, why learn a framework. That will take time to learn. I can just hammer out the code on my own. Very short-term thinking.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#18This is not a tip. The author simply reported his natural learning curve. Naturally, you learn a lot at the beginning and later on you don't learn as much. The author went through this process and thought that because he didn't learn much "other things" at the end, he was doing the right thing, and he had made mistakes early on by not focusing only "the thing" he was supposed to learn.
No, he did not make mistakes by digressing into learning things that are related but might not be directly addressing his problems at hand.
Learning is complicated, as things that you learn help you in ways that you might not be even aware of.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#19Hacking stuff together from stackoverflow might be faster initially, but later on the product will encounter severe quality issues. Learning the fundamentals and foundations of a technology, combined with experience and architecture knowledge will make a programmer 10x faster while still maintaining quality.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#20I think the real secret for coding better, is to know when to apply this advice (just looking for the answer you need without exploring anything else) and at other times maybe when you have more times, make some in-depth learning of broader technologies / API / languages / maths... areas that you've previously identified and tagged as potentially worth investigating. From my experience I can tell you this is the second component which make you a better developer in the long term. But the first component is also essential, it is the one that makes you start things and complete things without falling into endless procastrination and second guessing. So both short-term and long-term strategies are importants.