Mirko <mirkok.li...@googlemail.com> writes: > TLDR: Sorry for OT. Long-time Linux geek and hobby programmer wants to > improve his coding skills. What's most important: project planing, > algorithms and data structures, contributing to FOSS, web development, > learning other languages or something else?
If it's specifically about coding skills, the most important thing is reading and writing lots of code. That said, coding skills are just one facet of a good developer. The most important developers in the group I work with aren't necessarily the strongest coders. They're the ones with the best knowledge of the (large) program's organization, how to use the testing frameworks (CI system), and above all Git ;-). One coding exercise I like is to write some simple program and then tweak the code until you think it is perfect. That's similar to improving your writing by editing something you've written til you get all the phrasing just right. > - I never sit down and plan anything with pencil and paper, > flowcharts, UML or anything else. That's not worthwhile unless you're doing some very complicated, and even then it's usually just some diagrams and some written docs. Flowcharts were a 1950s thing and UML is a corporate Java thing. > - I never learned algorithms and data structures. I know *what* > (linked) lists, dicts, arrays, structs, and trees are; what binary > search or bubble-sort is, but I never really studied them, let alone > implemented them for educative purposes. I'd say Python saves you from having to understand how stuff like linked lists and hash tables work, at least at first. It will become important but not for now. If you were programming in C it would all be important and fundamental immediately. But, read this: http://antirez.com/news/112 > - When it comes to coding, I'm heavily shy and unsure. Do you play a musical instrument? Think of how much more confident you became with practice, even if you never got very good at it. > But web programming always feel like being trapped in a > mangrove jungle, Yeah, I feel the same way and avoid that stuff. > - I'm very hard to motivate, when the issue or topic doesn't interest > me much. I know some tricks to increase my motivation in such cases, > but don't use them enough. For doing stuff on your own, it's fine to narrow them down to stuff that excites you and that you want to keep doing. It does help to cultivate persistence for things like debugging. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
