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False dichotomy. People are capable of doing more than one thing. I'm a designer who writes code. Developers can learn design basics, and doing so will serve them well!

You're right though about practice. That topic is on my outline.

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well, i think the point is more "any time you're designing (or learning to design) is time you're not coding" (which, let's be honest, the times that you can actually be doing both at the same time are few and far between) for some folks that's not an acceptable tradeoff, for others it is.

That's fair. I think it's about prioritizing. At some point, coding new features becomes less important than improving aspects of the design. So the tradeoff will vary with each situation.

You rarely have to do both at the same time.

IMHO if you've just started out on a startup - its better to be a designer because you can do customer devleopment without touching a line of code but by having a design which shows the customer exactly what to expect.

After you get a bunch of people begging you to build, then you build.

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