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Ask HN: How do you develop incredible coding skills?

9 points by ishanr 12y ago

There seems to be a lot of tutorials available for beginners but how do you develop skills which take you into the top 1%?

adrianhoward 12y ago
1) Work with people who are better at coding that you are. 2) Write lots of code. 3) Repeat.
- lazyfunctor 12y ago
  This. It holds for other skills as well.
lsiebert 12y ago
Coding. Coding. More Coding. You spend a lot of time working on problems. You learn to generalize. You save and reuse code. You go off and try stuff and make mistakes. You read less tutorials, but you actually try to implement more stuff you read about, instead of reading it. You learn from people. Those who know more, those who know different, those who study CS and those who study art, psychology, gerontology, whatever. You go over what you learn. You teach, you tutor, you explain, you blog, so you get a better grasp on what you know, so you think about and recontextualize what you take for granted, so you can nail down ideas. You go back and look at old code you wrote, and fix it. You read code, yours and others, bad code and good code. You submit a pull request to add a feature to something you use. You stop worrying about being the top whatever, and focus on being better then you used to be.
Stoo 12y ago
Writing code, thinking about code, reading code. As an addendum to what adrianhoward said, work with people who are better at coding than you are, then work with people who are worse at coding than you are. You will learns loads of things from both.
- adrianhoward 12y ago
  "then work with people who are worse at coding than you are" ++$lots to this. Helping and teaching others is a stupidly effective technique to understand things better yourself.
  - Stoo 12y ago
    Yeah, I think you only fully understand something when you try to explain it to someone else.
niveditasetru 12y ago
1) Get some open source projects in a technology you are familiar with and try to fix bugs. 2) A framework is a good example to learn good coding skills. As it gives a very structured, scalable code. So, you can learn few good techniques. 3) Get a person who you think writes good code to review your code. 3) Practice, practice and more practice. Please note- there is no top here. Every developer's technique to write code would be different. So, you cant compare yourself with others. You just need to worry about writing efficient code.
yen223 12y ago
This is going to be controversial around here, but going back to uni and taking up compsci courses has helped me a lot
- ishanr 12y ago
  hmm... surprising.. why do you think going back to uni later helped you...
  - yen223 12y ago
    To be part of the proverbial top 1%, you won't just be thinking about the code - you need to be able to understand the subtle interactions that happen within a software system, from high-level algorithms down to the low-level compiler stuff, and further down to the bare-metal OS layer. The kind of stuff you will learn from a decent CS course. Now granted, you could teach yourself all of this, but then you'd have a teacher who knows absolutely nothing. It's worth having a mentor to guide you through all this. Doesn't have to be from a university, but it doesn't hurt either.
oweiler 12y ago
Do not be afraid to make mistakes.
haidrali 12y ago
Though i am not among top 1% bit, here are few personnel skills - Choose you favorite language ( your can't have same skill in all languages so choose you base language mine is JAVA ) - Work in opensource ( it will give you experience of reading and understanding code of other programmers, also your code will be seen by others ) - Follow tutorials for tasks you have not fully grasp - Automation ( do automation testing for your code ) hope it might help
- davelnewton 12y ago
  I mostly agree, but on the subject of languages we differ. I think it's critical to be able to think in languages outside your "favorite" language's paradigms. Java and similar languages, in particular, force you into a depressingly narrow range of looking at problems, and it will hurt your programming skills.
davelnewton 12y ago
What would it mean to be in the "top 1%"?
zygotic12 12y ago
I see people at work hammering keyboards for 10 hour stretches 6 days a week and feel sad for the current state of the profession. Being a developer is about THINKING. Converting your solution into code is the easy bit (typing I say). Forget the language, concentrate on the solution. BTW architecture is just the crap that you need to do in YOUR environment. Chuck has it right - go FORTH my son. http://www.colorforth.com/ http://www.colorforth.com/. Anything else is just domain/environment knowledge.
LarryMade2 12y ago
Try incredible stuff - challenge yourself. Break a rule or two now and then, then see how to make it unbroken.

9 points by ishanr 12y ago

There seems to be a lot of tutorials available for beginners but how do you develop skills which take you into the top 1%?

adrianhoward 12y ago

1) Work with people who are better at coding that you are. 2) Write lots of code. 3) Repeat.

lazyfunctor 12y ago
This. It holds for other skills as well.

lsiebert 12y ago

Coding. Coding. More Coding. You spend a lot of time working on problems. You learn to generalize. You save and reuse code. You go off and try stuff and make mistakes. You read less tutorials, but you actually try to implement more stuff you read about, instead of reading it. You learn from people. Those who know more, those who know different, those who study CS and those who study art, psychology, gerontology, whatever. You go over what you learn. You teach, you tutor, you explain, you blog, so you get a better grasp on what you know, so you think about and recontextualize what you take for granted, so you can nail down ideas. You go back and look at old code you wrote, and fix it. You read code, yours and others, bad code and good code. You submit a pull request to add a feature to something you use. You stop worrying about being the top whatever, and focus on being better then you used to be.

Stoo 12y ago

Writing code, thinking about code, reading code. As an addendum to what adrianhoward said, work with people who are better at coding than you are, then work with people who are worse at coding than you are. You will learns loads of things from both.

adrianhoward 12y ago
"then work with people who are worse at coding than you are" ++$lots to this. Helping and teaching others is a stupidly effective technique to understand things better yourself.
- Stoo 12y ago
  Yeah, I think you only fully understand something when you try to explain it to someone else.

niveditasetru 12y ago

1) Get some open source projects in a technology you are familiar with and try to fix bugs. 2) A framework is a good example to learn good coding skills. As it gives a very structured, scalable code. So, you can learn few good techniques. 3) Get a person who you think writes good code to review your code. 3) Practice, practice and more practice. Please note- there is no top here. Every developer's technique to write code would be different. So, you cant compare yourself with others. You just need to worry about writing efficient code.

yen223 12y ago

This is going to be controversial around here, but going back to uni and taking up compsci courses has helped me a lot

ishanr 12y ago
hmm... surprising.. why do you think going back to uni later helped you...
- yen223 12y ago
  To be part of the proverbial top 1%, you won't just be thinking about the code - you need to be able to understand the subtle interactions that happen within a software system, from high-level algorithms down to the low-level compiler stuff, and further down to the bare-metal OS layer. The kind of stuff you will learn from a decent CS course. Now granted, you could teach yourself all of this, but then you'd have a teacher who knows absolutely nothing. It's worth having a mentor to guide you through all this. Doesn't have to be from a university, but it doesn't hurt either.

oweiler 12y ago

Do not be afraid to make mistakes.

haidrali 12y ago

Though i am not among top 1% bit, here are few personnel skills - Choose you favorite language ( your can't have same skill in all languages so choose you base language mine is JAVA ) - Work in opensource ( it will give you experience of reading and understanding code of other programmers, also your code will be seen by others ) - Follow tutorials for tasks you have not fully grasp - Automation ( do automation testing for your code ) hope it might help

davelnewton 12y ago
I mostly agree, but on the subject of languages we differ. I think it's critical to be able to think in languages outside your "favorite" language's paradigms. Java and similar languages, in particular, force you into a depressingly narrow range of looking at problems, and it will hurt your programming skills.

davelnewton 12y ago

What would it mean to be in the "top 1%"?

zygotic12 12y ago

I see people at work hammering keyboards for 10 hour stretches 6 days a week and feel sad for the current state of the profession. Being a developer is about THINKING. Converting your solution into code is the easy bit (typing I say). Forget the language, concentrate on the solution. BTW architecture is just the crap that you need to do in YOUR environment. Chuck has it right - go FORTH my son. http://www.colorforth.com/ http://www.colorforth.com/. Anything else is just domain/environment knowledge.

LarryMade2 12y ago

Try incredible stuff - challenge yourself. Break a rule or two now and then, then see how to make it unbroken.