1. Don’t memorize; go deep-dive
Give a man the code, he suffers for a day. Teach the man to code, he suffers for a lifetime. 😁
Being from a science background, some people may have the habit of rot learning and passing exams. But I was never a rot-learner in my entire student life. I always prefer to deep-dive and learn things to their fundamentals. Though this is time-consuming, it made me a curious learner & better developer.
While ago, I had confusion with how CSS Flexbox worked. I first watched some video, & I was as good as in the dark. Then, when I actually went & made some flexboxes and some layouts, I finally came to know how row, column, parent, and child elements work. This study gave me a memory for a lifetime about flexboxes that I would never forget.
Hence, you must build a habit to practice and learn the concepts to their fundamentals.
2. Iterate on Roadmap
Roadmap.sh must be the best website to find a roadmap for any niche in software development. And when you follow the roadmap, you should first travel that road theoritically, just with concepts and small code snippets of headings mentioned in the roadmap.
And when you finish learning the concepts in, say, 1 month, from the following month on, you try to build projects around the roadmap & deep-dive into concepts as you need. And hence, repeat this process of building projects and viewing roadmap during confusion until you die. 😂
3. Read other’s code
Reading other people’s code, be it your colleagues upskilling just as you or an advanced project on GitHub, builds a style of advanced & efficient logical patterns in your mind that you can reuse to improve your code.
For example, for a long time I didn’t understand the importance of try {} catch{} blocks in Javascript. And later, when I saw a lot of projects using try…catch and even my colleagues using it in their projects, I became curious & deep-dived into it. There I learned a technique to handle errors (exceptions) that can occur while running the code.
4. Learn to Google
This must be the top-most skill that will improve as a developer. Googling, visiting documentation, and using StackOverflow is the best way to work during a project. People over the internet and the very documentation of the technology you are working with will provide you with detailed guidance to achieve the task that you are looking for.
Especially, official documentation of the technology is most fruitful, as YouTube videos aren’t available right away when a new technology takes a boom. Because it will take some time to learn and prepare videos for YouTube too. So, if you want to have the lowest ping with technical skill boom, you must learn to read & use documentation.
5. Escape tutorial hell
In the programming world, tutorial hell is a phase where you are indefinitely consuming tutorials about technologies but not actually coding & travelling out of the road as shown in he tutorial. As you become an intermediate in the field, it is best to watch the tutorial once in 2x & go and build your project, which is also slightly different from the tutorial. This habit will give you the realization of freedom & opportunities for innovation.
6. You are not a super-computer
I say this because, as a programmer, you don’t need to learn all concepts of programming; the DSA, database, security, blockchain, AI, ML, etc. list goes long. Let’s say you are a Javascript developer. You are all good if you only know front-end, backend, database (1), API, authentication, and popular frameworks or libraries (such as Node, Express, and React). And that’s it.
There would be a lot to learn as time passes. But for starting out and landing your first job, the set of skills is enough. You must not worry about the fact that you may not have knowledge of everything over the programming. This brings us to another famous terminology in tech known as “Imposter Syndrome””. Which is a feeling that you self-doubt yourself that you know very little as soon as you see the horizon of the programming world.
You must thereby realize that you are a human being with limited energy & can’t be a supercomputer to have all knowledge. In fact, you must fill this insecurity with soft skills like communication and entrepreneurship.
7. Co-learning is effective
You must always have a habit of gring each available hour of your day to craft yourself. But, when you are with like-minded people with the same goal as you, the co-learning in those moments is saved permanently in your memory. Be it in the computer lab with your friends, in a tech event, or in a hackathon.
This is effective as it has human experience and you are engaging with a person face-to-face. You must always grab a chance to co-lean with your buddies.
Also, talking about buddies, you can also join my favourite facebook tech group, Ask Buddie
Image Credit: Freepik
An Article By: Pradip Timilsina (@sinapradip)