Pinned — 28 Oct 2025 #codingStreet-Smart Coding: 30 Ways to Get Better at Coding Without Losing Your Mind
I spent five years in college learning to code.
A stupid dissertation delayed my graduation. But that’s another story.
Most of my five-year program didn’t prepare me for real-world coding. My real coding journey began at my first job, with one Google search: “how to get good at coding.”
I found a lot of conflicting advice:
“Use comments”
“Don’t use comments”
“Do this”
“Don’t do that”
Arrggg!
It took years of trial and error to learn what worked.
I had to survive on-call shifts, talk to stakeholders, and say “no” politely. More importantly, I had to learn that coding takes more than just syntax.
That’s why I wrote Street-Smart Coding— a roadmap of 30 lessons I wish I had when I started. For every dev who’s ever typed “how to get better at coding” into Google or ChatGPT. (Back in my days, I didn’t have ChatGPT… Wait, I sound like a nostalgic grandpa…)
Preview of the first ~12 pages
Inside “Street-Smart Coding”
This isn’t a textbook. It’s a battle-tested guide for your journey from junior/mid-level to senior.
Some lessons are conventional.
Others were learned the hard way.
And a few are weird.
One lesson comes from a TV show. Nope, not Mr. Robot or Silicon Valley. That’s on Chapter #29. It will teach you about problem-solving.
You’ll learn how to:
Google like a pro
Debug without banging your head against a wall
Communicate clearly with non-tech folks
…and 27 more lessons I learned over ten years of mistakes.
“We have these tote bags. They’re so practical,” she told me.
I was secretly buying a birthday present for my sister.
“I’m looking for Hello Kitty merch,” I told her when I entered the store.
My sister was turning 30, but still adored Hello Kitty.
She left the register and guided me to a red aisle with almost every Hello Kitty item you can imagine.
When I showed her a photo of my sister, she recommended the right lipstick—Hello Kitty-themed, of course.
“OK, I trust you,” I said and went with her recommendation.
After a few minutes, buying a lotion…
Moments later, I was in a skin-care store.
It was a single-aisle store, bottles of all sizes behind bright, mirrored selves.
I pulled out my phone and showed a photo of the lotion I needed to buy.
“Have you used it before?” the cashier asked me.
“It’s an errand,” I said.
“You can buy a refill instead,” she searched for the lotion on the shelves.
“Did you know that’s only the first step in a good skincare routine?” she said.
“You also need…,” she started to list other products I didn’t know about.
I only said thanks and smiled.
I wasn’t really a client.
I didn’t know about their products or skincare routines.
I had said I was there to buy one exact product.
The lotion from the photo.
Guess who offered me a better service?
The first one: the one where I bought the Hello Kitty bag.
I said what I needed and got exactly that.
Lesson: Meet your clients, readers, prospects, or whoever where they’re at.
Sometimes help is giving them what they asked for.
That’s the best customer service.
For a moment, I thought something had gone wrong with my computer.
One of the windows I had opened mysteriously closed.
After a “wait what” moment, I realized I had accidentally pressed Delete while holding Alt and Tab.
That closes a window without asking for confirmation.
That was it!
#2. Change your keyboard input language.
I didn’t understand why my keyboard input language kept changing between English and Spanish.
That’s a bit annoying when coding:
Symbols aren’t on the same keys.
My muscle memory defaults to the English layout.
This week, I noticed Ctrl and Shift changed the language while coding the old way.
That’s a common key combination inside Visual Studio:
To compile, or close tabs…
Sometimes I press those two keys when thinking…and that changes the input language.
To turn it off, go to “Advanced keyboard settings.”
Then, to “Input language hot keys,” look for “Between input languages.”
Click on “Change key sequence” and unset it.
Quick update: I’m about 70% through the first draft of Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. Of course, it’s a rough draft that needs editing. But I came up with 4 traits of a street-smart coder.
And as usual, here are 4.5 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Preorder your digital copy of Street-Smart Coding Manifesto—starting at just $1—and become a coder who stands out beyond syntax. If you’d like to support the work, contribute $5 or more and I’ll thank you in the Acknowledgments.
That’s what Greg Baugues’ daughter asked him after her first encounter with vibe-coding.
She was curious if there was a time when we had to type symbols, one by one.
It isn’t about what symbols to type
Coding used to be about the craft:
Mastering symbols and perfecting the lines of code.
If you knew what to type and could make it work, you could find your way as a coder.
Its main page is an entangled mess of over 40K lines of Visual Basic code.
Migrating it to anything newer is time-consuming.
To ease the pain of migrating it, management suggested starting some refactoring work.
The migration has dragged on for years, still far from completion.
The refactoring work won’t show any visible progress on a late project.
Prompt an LLM to migrate it to Blazor isn’t hard.
But its output will only create more problems, without the mental models of the codebase.
The challenge is deciding the right approach: refactoring, migration, or rewrite.
The real edge is: knowing coding is solving problems and choosing what problems to solve.
When coding is cheap, your edge comes from outside your IDE. To help you grow beyond syntax, check Street-Smart Coding Manifesto.
