How to Practice Programming

Here’s a great article with concrete action steps to learn and improve your coding skills: How to Practice Programming

Specifically this post taught me about the importance of not copying and pasting code:

Type Out Code From a Book

This is why people love Zed Shaw’s Learn Code the Hard Way series and it is the first book that cemented the Ruby language in my head. Actually TYPING out the code bit by bit works. Don’t copy and paste but actually, type.

I have recently begun writing out code by hand and although it is much slower, it seems to give me more time to think and reflect on what the code is actually doing. I am going to add this handwriting technique to my toolbox, and also review these notes regularly.

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