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Comment by qiskit | Hacker News Reader

> A colleague told me the best way to level up coding skills is to read excellent code.

The best way to level up is to code. Reading code can be a complementary activity that can bring insights but it's not a way to level up. Active > passive.

> Do you have favorite repos that highlight this?

For what language? Desktop, mobile? Systems programming or web development? Linux/BSD/etc all have source code available. I believe microsoft has open sourced the .Net Framework or parts of it.

It's like you are learning a foreign language and want us to recommend good books? Can't really help you if you don't tell us the foreign language and your goals for the language ( casual conversation, business, translation, etc ).

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> The best way to level up is to code.

Up to a point, yes. But beyond that point, in my experience, a deliberate study of software architecture is required to move forward. That and mentorship/code reviews by people who have a deeper appreciation of software architecture.

You start by wanting to learn how to code, then you write a lot of code, then you progress by learning how to write less code and less complex code.

"The best way to level up is to code. Reading code can be a complementary activity that can bring insights but it's not a way to level up. Active > passive."

Both writing and reading code is important. It's just that most people, in my experience, do not actively search out code to read and spend more time writing code.

>> A colleague told me the best way to level up coding skills is to read excellent code.

> The best way to level up is to code.

I think it's much more subtle than either of these.

First of all, "excellent code" is an extremely subjective thing. I once worked with this one developer. He could cook up solutions to complex problems very quickly. But he didn't comment or docstring any of his code, he favored writing his own libraries and frameworks rather than pull in dependencies, and every single thing he wrote was grossly over-engineered once you managed to figure out what it was doing.

Which is a long way of saying, he was a brilliant programmer who wrote very shitty code. And unfortunately, there are a large number of open source projects and maintainers like this, so picking some at random to study may not get you very far.

> Reading code can be a complementary activity that can bring insights but it's not a way to level up.

Counter-point: As a professional developer one might spend far more time reading code than writing code. In my experience, all the good developers I've worked with have the ability to skim through large code bases and quickly zone into the parts that interest them. It is a very deliberate skill to cultivate.

I once put down my thoughts on this : http://lonetwin.net/20090829/hacks-you-can-live-without/on-r...

Not sure your counterpoint is a counterpoint. I think it just illustrates there are multiple ways of reading code, just like reading text.

Reading text to research is different than reading text to learn to be a better writer.

"Practice makes perfect" is a common refrain, and there is some truth to it... but more accurately, perfect practice makes perfect. If you practice bad form, you will execute bad form. Merely writing code is not necessarily good practice. Writing good code is good practice. Ergo, alternating between reading good code and writing code is an effective means of leveling up.

The post originally asked about Python programming. OP made it more general on purpose.

I'll (tongue-in-cheekly) prompt you with the following:

Language: Whatever qiskit is most familiar with OR has a favorite recommendation for (based on qiskit's interests). Domain: Whatever qiskit is most familiar with OR has a favorite recommendation for (based on qiskit's interests).

Unfortunately, a lot of developers run into clever, over-abstracted code they can't understand (repeatedly) and then eventually grasp it and think it's OK or even preferred to write clever code like that themselves. It's like a virus.

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