7 Crazy Tips That Will Help You Become a Better Coder

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2 points·willfarrell··2 comments

Is this a joke article? I’d say the only valid point here is ‘Type Book Code Examples By Hand’

‘Write Your Own Framework’ and ‘Re-Invent the Wheel’ are not good ideas and won’t make you a better coder, you’ll just end up writing more bad code. Instead I’d recommend aspiring developers to get involved with an established open source project; its easy to find something on github.com which piques your interest and needs help/bugfixes/new ideas. Learn the codebase inside out, commit patches and you’ll pick up a tonne of good practices which you can then apply to your own projects.

Becoming a better coder doesn’t entail using a vanilla text editor and no browser tools. These things are there to help you and make writing code easier; it’s still important to understand the underlying technologies, and why things work the way they do, but forgoing the development tools of the last 10 years isn’t useful.

They are indeed crazy tips, I hope nobody follows them.

I found it more of a reflection on how developers have evolved over the last decade and that the understanding of the code / intricacies on how the languages work are slowly being lost. The tips I guess are aimed at those, hopefully few, that haven't been been programming on the web for the last decade and started with 'copy/paste' style.

Note in the article he mentions not to follow the tips when working on a project for a client where there are deadlines. Instead, apply them to personal projects as learning exercises.

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