How I became a better developer?
I have become so aligned with development, I can almost develop any technology with time and experimentation. Well… hopefully.
I am gonna keep this blog real short, so that you, the reader, can have good learning retention from this blog.
How did I become a better developer? You would expect a few terms here and there: practice, learning new tech.
These were part of the process, but there’s more to it than just practice and learning. There’s online TV series involved, reverse engineering and praying.
Not gonna beat around the bush anymore. Let’s get to it.
Practice. But not the way you are taught in school.
I have been building projects since I was in my first year of college. It’s been 3 years since I have been building on some technology or another.
For my first-year project for the subject Computer Programming-I, I built a text-based game, made in the language C, on CoVID-19. It was a simple text-based game, with multiple function calls, loops and jumps.
It was mainly spaghetti code, but that was my first attempt at building a project.
Soon, I got into web development, using JavaScript and Python. I did a few basic projects, mainly to try out stuff in design and landing pages.
Then I stumbled onto ReactJS, one of the first frameworks I had ever worked with. I did a few guided projects with React. I even wrote the front-end code for CSCult‘s website with React. And then it became my favorite framework in the whole world to build web apps.
I also state that I have worked with a whole lotta technologies. Machine learning, AI, data analytics, Web2 and Web3 as well.
You see: the more I built projects, the better I could improve my developer skills with every project. My typing speed became better. I didn’t have to take much time thinking about how a subroutine would work and then code it.
My advice: build as many projects as you can
Read. Read in the name of Thy Lord who created you.
Every third billionaire gives the advice to read books. Learning is a journey that keeps on course till the day you die. You learn to survive. You learn to understand the reality of your life. You learn to build… a P2P WebRTC-based video and text chat platform, which is what I am currently building at 🟣Stemble.
Reading books is the best habit you could keep. But most importantly for a developer, reading documentations and source-code is even more important.
You see there are two ways to learn a technology. You could watch tutorials and guides on YouTube or a Udemy course; or you could read up the docs for that framework.
I would like to compare this with an analogy.
If you want to learn about a religion, would you rather learn it from a religious leader, who will give you a gist of the religion, because well, he would have limited time, knowledge & recall.
Or would you read the original scriptures that teach you about the religion.
I would definitely go for the second choice. Reading up the docs, from the introduction to the latest developments, is a journey in its own.
My advice: You want to learn a new technology, you read up the original documentation, that the developers of that technology drafted.
Don’t tell me prayer doesn’t work.
This is a quote from The Big Bang Theory.
Mary Cooper (Sheldon’s Mom) is a very pious woman, who’s always concerned about Sheldon and his friends as well. She claims that the reason for Leonard to finally catch a break with Penny and Sheldon to show some maturity was a result of prayer.
I believe her.
We pray to God for everything in our life. Blessings, good will, peace, wealth, health.
We developers pray to God for our build to work without any errors.
Of course, when we develop a technology, we can’t expect even the best of developers to make their first build without errors. There’s always gonna be bugs and uncertain behaviour.
Trial-and-error is necessary for being a good developer. If you are afraid to fail pursuing a method to make something work, then you are actually stopping yourself from becoming better.
Failure is essential. Because when you fail in a certain approach, you will not use that approach again, thus not wasting any more time.
My advice: Keep praying. Trial-and-error works. Failure is not an option. Don’t be afraid to try.
Saving the best for the last!
One of the things that I do (and well did), is watch sitcoms and shows on programmers. I have watched Silicon Valley 3 times. Every time I watch it, I try to understand all the technology jargon they speak.
Jargon like sub-routines, Shannon encoding, middle-out compression and SCRAM.
There are even times when I pause to take a look at the code on the programmers’ laptops.
One of the things I did in the past 2 years was to watch as many tech shows as I could. I watched Silicon Valley, Scorpion, Mr. Robot.
My advice: Watch Silicon Valley and Scorpion. As many times as you can. Period.
