Becoming a successful programmer is often the result of a lot of hard work, learning, and persistence. And while there are no secret recipes or magic formulas to becoming a successful programmer, there are some helpful tips and strategies that can help you get started and become more successful at it.
Here are 10 tips that can help you become a better, more successful programmer:
1. Solve one problem every day – A great way to start your day as a programmer is to solve one small programming challenge or problem every day. You’ll find a ton of coding challenges and quizzes available online that you can use to hone your skills in specific areas like algorithms and data structures.
2. Build something new every week – Another great exercise you can do is to build something new every week. It doesn’t have to be anything big or fancy, just something new that you haven’t done before. As long as you’re trying something different, even if it’s not something useful, this will greatly help expand your knowledge and skill set over time.
3. Learn how to use Git – In today’s programming world, the most popular version control system is Git (and Github). Learning how to use Git proficiently is an absolute requirement for any serious developer these days. Take
Many people have asked me, “How can I become a successful programmer?”
It’s not an easy question to answer. A lot of it depends on how you define “success.” To one person, success might mean making a six-figure salary working for Google. For someone else, success might mean starting their own open source project that gains worldwide recognition.
I don’t think there is any one path to becoming a successful programmer. But here are some things that I think will help you along the way:
1. Learn to love programming
No matter what your end goal is, you’re going to have to enjoy programming if you want to be successful at it. You don’t have to love every language or every aspect of programming, but you should have something that gets you excited about what you’re doing. If you hate programming or the language that you’re using, then find something else!
2. Be curious
You don’t have to find something that excites you right away – sometimes it just takes time. But be curious and explore different languages and possibilities until you find something that really clicks for you!
Programming is an incredibly complex and stressful job, and those who learn how to do it well take years to master the craft.
The best programmers are people that have a passion for their work. They love what they do and they’re constantly trying to improve their skills. You need to be able to work long hours and you must be able to stay focused on your task at hand.
You also need to be creative. Programming requires that you learn how to solve problems in new ways, which requires a lot of creativity.
A successful programmer will be able to understand a complex problem and come up with an elegant solution.
Being a good programmer also means being a good communicator. You must be able to communicate your ideas clearly and effectively, both in writing and verbally. Good communication skills will enable you to explain your ideas better and make it easier for others to understand them as well.
It’s also important that you have strong analytical skills. Programming requires that you think critically about problems and come up with solutions based on logic rather than emotion or intuition.
The conventional wisdom is that you have to be a good programmer to become a successful programmer. This is false.
Most programmers are mediocre. The best programmers are not significantly better than the worst programmers. Most of the variation in their code quality is explained by how hard they’re trying, and this depends more on what kind of person they are than whether they’re good or bad at programming.
The conventional wisdom has it wrong because it’s based on anecdotes about the most successful programmers, who are exceptional in many ways beyond just being good programmers. For example, Elon Musk is an excellent programmer, but he’s also unusually obsessive and competitive, which contribute to his success in addition to his programming ability.
To learn more about why the best programmers aren’t as good as you might guess, read The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
1. Learn to code
2. Code every day
3. Create a project
4. Contribute to an open source community
5. Attend a programming meetup
6. Create a blog
7. Get social
8. Get a mentor
9. Network!
10. Become an expert in computer science fundamentals
“In fact, it’s the most important problem in computer science. There are two big problems in software: programming and debugging. Debugging is the biggest problem.”
– Alan J. Perlis
“The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.”
– Randall E. Stross
“I think great programmers think of computers as their friends and enjoy working with them. I think of computers as powerful tools that are kind of dumb.”
– Paul Graham
“If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.”
– Alan Perlis
“The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.”
– Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy
“General and efficient access to disk storage is the most important problem facing the computer industry today.”
– Alan Kay, 1981