4 Strategies for Building a Coding Habit That You Can Maintain
“Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.” — Naval Ravikant
There is no doubt that coding is a valuable skill. And like any other skill the more you do it, the more you learn.
Maybe you’ve tried learning to code in the past but had to quit halfway through. The key is to develop a coding habit that you maintain. I will introduce 4 strategies to make it easier to maintain your coding habit and produce tangible results by making small improvements every day.
1. Avoid anything that delays your coding
Don’t get stuck setting up a perfect environment.
If this is going to be a bottleneck, start with an online environment like replit.com that comes ready out-of-the-box. However, if you know how to set up your coding environment for your desired programming language then go ahead and set it up locally.
2. You learn by coding not watching tutorials
99% of tutorials don’t teach you anything beyond the basics.
Once you know the basics, forget the tutorials and start coding. You don’t need to complete every course, tutorial, or YouTube video before you’re ready to code.
3. Your coding sessions should be only about coding
You need to be 100% focused on writing code during your coding session. For this to happen you can do a few things beforehand:
- Have an arsenal of ideas for coding sessions and keep adding to them
- Pick an idea from your list and plan your session the night before
Some broad idea categories:
- Solving programming problems on projecteuler.net or leetcode.com
- Working on a personal side project
- Contributing to an open-source project
- Automating a process or task
- Practicing a new concept by poking around different examples
- Reading a tool’s documentation and building something simple using the examples
4. Make coding a social activity
Use the power of the internet to share your work and learn in public.
This can be intimidating at first. You might be afraid of being judged if you start sharing in public. But once you start sharing your work, you start learning faster, you get immediate feedback from others, and people share their knowledge with you. You also get to meet amazing people online and build an online audience.
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