| Edited on
There are multiple ways that we can use to improve our coding skills, most likely you have already tried a few and found them useful but only to some extent, or maybe you found out that some require you to invest an amount of time that you don’t actually have. To give you more context I’ll be naming some of the most common paths like learning different types of algorithms and their use cases, making a project from scratch or following coding tutorials.
Depending on your type of persona, algorithms may be fun and challenging which is great as learning them allows you to have a solid foundation, but this doesn’t stand on its own, we need to apply them to something, and although making a project from scratch is something that every one of us must do at least once, it can take a great amount of time, a thing that is quite scarce. Same goes for coding tutorials, they can be a kickstarter in your career as a developer, or make you feel more useless than an umbrella for shoes. It may even lead you down an endless rabbit hole without you even noticing, after following a tutorial that shows you how to build X your serotonin levels start to go up, because you just built something, but the reality is that you didn’t, you just followed instructions like the ones you follow when assembling something from IKEA.
It gave you a starting point, but lots of people don’t seem to grasp it, which is normal, because building something from scratch involves many moving parts and can’t be learned entirely in a course, you usually become aware of this when you go and try to make something on your own without having the tutorial guidance, only to end up going back to it constantly.
Luckily there is an ever increasing amount of tools that we have at our disposal to aid us in the task of refining our coding skills. After going through many tutorials, books and projects I found about katas, which have its origin in a karate exercise that consists of repeating a specific form many times making tiny improvements in each iteration. A code kata is something similar, but it doesn’t require you to know karate and wear a karate-gi, instead it asks you to work on a short exercise for about 30 minutes to an hour, in which the objective is not to find the correct solution but rather think about what your approach will be.
The art of programming is grounded on the process of thinking, knowing the theory is a must and understanding how things work helps to, but the thing that will drive you further is practice, doing the same exercise over and over again, without focusing on the solution and instead gathering feedback from the things that you did and the ones that you didn’t but could have done.
| Edited on
There are multiple ways that we can use to improve our coding skills, most likely you have already tried a few and found them useful but only to some extent, or maybe you found out that some require you to invest an amount of time that you don’t actually have. To give you more context I’ll be naming some of the most common paths like learning different types of algorithms and their use cases, making a project from scratch or following coding tutorials.
Depending on your type of persona, algorithms may be fun and challenging which is great as learning them allows you to have a solid foundation, but this doesn’t stand on its own, we need to apply them to something, and although making a project from scratch is something that every one of us must do at least once, it can take a great amount of time, a thing that is quite scarce. Same goes for coding tutorials, they can be a kickstarter in your career as a developer, or make you feel more useless than an umbrella for shoes. It may even lead you down an endless rabbit hole without you even noticing, after following a tutorial that shows you how to build X your serotonin levels start to go up, because you just built something, but the reality is that you didn’t, you just followed instructions like the ones you follow when assembling something from IKEA.
It gave you a starting point, but lots of people don’t seem to grasp it, which is normal, because building something from scratch involves many moving parts and can’t be learned entirely in a course, you usually become aware of this when you go and try to make something on your own without having the tutorial guidance, only to end up going back to it constantly.
Luckily there is an ever increasing amount of tools that we have at our disposal to aid us in the task of refining our coding skills. After going through many tutorials, books and projects I found about katas, which have its origin in a karate exercise that consists of repeating a specific form many times making tiny improvements in each iteration. A code kata is something similar, but it doesn’t require you to know karate and wear a karate-gi, instead it asks you to work on a short exercise for about 30 minutes to an hour, in which the objective is not to find the correct solution but rather think about what your approach will be.
The art of programming is grounded on the process of thinking, knowing the theory is a must and understanding how things work helps to, but the thing that will drive you further is practice, doing the same exercise over and over again, without focusing on the solution and instead gathering feedback from the things that you did and the ones that you didn’t but could have done.