This is a really good way to stay junior level for your entire career.
A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#22This seems like a good way to get 1 year's experience ten times.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#23You don't become full stack by being shitty at lots of things quickly. You become full stack by going deep in many places, preferably quickly. This guy possesses some very short term thinking.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#24This seems like a good way to get 1 year's experience ten times.
For anyone who's curious, this oft-repeated expression originates from the novel Shibumi (http://goo.gl/gPuyB, fourth line):
Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience — twenty times.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#25I find the "advice" in the post a bit confusing. Finding an answer on SO or a forum or a book will help you solve a specific problem (thus making you a "productive" coder). But I seriously doubt it will make you code faster in general if this "code snippet copy & paste coding" is not expanded into understanding so next time the search part is removed from the process.
In the early days, it always took me a lot more time to get from finding an answer to using that answer in my code. The main reason is that I didn't want to just copy paste something without understanding it. On the other hand, a more experienced colleague of mine was sifting through books and forums and pushing code a lot faster. I talked to him trying to understand what I'm doing wrong. As I've learned (actually both of us learned), the only difference was the existing knowledge each of us had about the environment and the app. Over time I got to be a lot faster at finding an answer and moving along, but that came only with becoming more familiar with the tools/lang/etc and being able to understand things faster.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#26Most common answer to any CS question in school is... "It depends".. And I think that applies here.
There are some situations where its better to have a good enough solution today rather than a perfect solution next week. And when you are in the earliest stages of product development, I apply this tip often (JFDI). But eventually there comes a time where your prototype has actually become a product, and too much hack & slash code begins to work against you rather than for you.
You have to make the judgement of where this tipping point is yourself, I am sure it is different for many developers.
Side note: I am currently refactoring a massive amount of my product's code because I am about to introduce some new and repetitive functionality. I don't mind hacky code, but to copy and paste it is down right sinful to me. So I guess I have reached my tipping point.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#27It depends the most on what kind of 'anything else' you avoid: ephemera or human capital. Getting better at telling them apart is one 'anything else' worth learning.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#28Great advice. If I decide to go down a rabbit hole, I typically set a time limit up front (usually 30-60 min) and try to stick to it.
Thanks. I also think that there's a time and a place for deep-dive learning and to properly learn the technologies. The key for me is to understand when I'm 1) solving a problem so I can get back to building something and 2) learning a technology or a skill that I know I need to pay attention to.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#29Lots of good points. For me I know that I can get lost in the weeds. But I also should have stated that I believe you need to take the time to learn technologies and skills properly - and there's a time and a place for that. But if I'm trying to build a project I'm focusing on getting that project done. If I run into something that might be productive to spend more time on it later then I'll set aside time later. But otherwise there's just too much to learn and my project won't get built.
Re: A Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster
#30The money quote: > The key to being a good developer is to be able to find your answer as quickly as possible without learning anything else. I originally parsed the title as "the one tip that will help you (learn to code) 10x faster", while this is obviously "the one tip that will help you learn to (code 10x faster)". The advice is in fact the exact opposite of what you should do if you want to learn faster.
At first, that quote made me shake my head. However, it took me a minute to realize that the advice isn't "Google all the things!"
Certainly, having to search for an answer is inevitable. But it is also orders of magnitude more slow than recalling something from memory, at least for me. I think the key here is having the wisdom to know what is important enough to recall immediately versus referencing as needed.
As an analogy, and acknowledging the differences, being proficient with an editor isn't about the speed with which you look up how to do something: it's about what you can do without having to stop and think.