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.
From Derek Sivers’ Useful But Not True, you can always choose your next thought or reaction.
But yesterday, I failed to choose my next reaction after a frustrating purchase over the phone.
Then I hit a roadblock with a coding task.
I felt how my energy was depleted.
My sister showed me her phone with some hotel Instagram accounts.
“They all look the same. I wonder if it’s AI,” she told me.
She was visiting profiles of two small hotels in our city.
Same colors. Same layout.
No way to tell one from the other.
The day before, a friend showed us a thank-you note from a community campaign.
It looked just like the hotels’ Instagram posts.
It’s not just Instagram or our friend’s picture.
Open LinkedIn and you’ll see the same infographic all over the feed.
Same colors. Same layout. Same cartoon style.
A coder said that while demoing a feature to a client.
C’mon! You wouldn’t forget that detail unless you had memory issues.
While screensharing, I noticed he had Codex open—another coding agent.
It wasn’t a memory issue after all.
Someone has been prompting, right?
I remembered that quick exchange when reading Yegor Bugayenko’s Couriers, Not Coders.
He wrote,
Working code is now the minimum. We expect discipline, speed of delivery, clear and detailed communication, and readiness to re-work. Above all, we expect you to understand our rules and obey them.
I loves his take.
When code is almost free, the edge isn’t in lines of code.
The genie in the bottle can grant coding wishes to anyone, with enough tokens, credits, or whatever.
AI isn’t taking our jobs yet.
And even if it does, there’s still work to do.
But our job descriptions are already different.
That’s what Tim Ferriss discovered when he looked at his spreadsheets.
The smoking gun: ChatGPT’s release around 2022, when his sales started to decrease.
And that’s the landscape for a best-selling author.
Now imagine being a mere mortal without Tim’s reach.
Here are some of the changes Tim is making—and how I’m stealing them:
Rely on personal stories
“For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the deeply personal stories that actually catalyze people to change long-standing habits.”
LLMs can spit out facts, but they’ll never create personal stories.
As Maria Popova said, “AI can’t suffer.”
It can’t have human experience.
Love, hate, pride, resentment…
That’s how we can fight back.
With my books, the best reward has been reading comments like “it feels like a conversation” or “refreshing, given how much AI slop has populated the internet.”
Those are the reviews that make my day.
“I’d rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes.”
The other day, a fiction author I followed on LinkedIn shared her new strategy:
Going to TikTok or BookTok.
Just like Tim, I’d rather write books for a few than dance on TikTok.
Maybe I’ll start a YouTube channel to go over my posts.
But writing is my way to go, even if only one person reads.
The best place is the one you can sustain over time.
Build a tribe
“Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.”
1,000 fans? That sounds distant.
And followers aren’t true fans.
To build my tribe, I’m writing for one person: my past self.
I’m writing the books I wish I had.
I’m leaving breadcrumbs as I document my life.
For anyone just like me years ago.
Stealing means blending your sources into something new: an artistic smoothie.
Not that I consider my writing “art,” but here are 7 writers I’ve stolen from:
Before getting seriously into writing, Seth was the first blogger I followed and studied.
I’ve borrowed his concept of a “post”:
A headline and a couple of sentences are enough to publish.
After finding his blog, I didn’t feel the need to write SEO-optimized guides anymore.
When I’m tempted to quit blogging, I remember Seth sharing about his 10,000th post.
After reading some of his books, I adopted concise, self-contained chapters.
That was the inspiration for Street-Smart Coding Manifesto.
#4. Austen Kleon.
Austen was the writer who taught me to steal.
He wrote Steal Like An Artist:
So I’m stealing from another thief.
No shame in admitting it.
After reading two of his books, I stole his book structure.
Each book is 10 ideas, one idea per chapter, with doodles and drawings.
Its back cover lists those 10 ideas.
