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.
Three months ago, I launched my first book, Street-Smart Coding. A persistence test.
It wasn’t my first, but the first I was confident enough to call a book. It challenged my persistence. I even wrote chapters in a hospital while supporting a loved one. Chapter 17 is one of those. Sometimes I avoid rereading those chapters.
#3. Set a deadline. A task can take as much time as we give it. Writing a book isn’t the exception. It took me about 4 months to finish the first draft. Here are more lessons nobody told me about writing a book.
#4. Once your book is out, the game starts in your head. That’s the fear of finding typos or getting bad reviews. That’s refreshing your sales dashboard and comparing your book to others. Here are more realizations. Just focus on what you can control: work on the next one.
#5. There’s always something you could have done better. Once it’s out, it’s out. Your job was to write it, your audience’s job is to read it. Again, work on the next one.
I’m doing this differently
By no means, I’m an expert book writer. I only have two under my belt. But here’s what I’d do differently.
#1. Start backwards. Start with a promise, cover, sales page, and outline. That forces you to clarify your book promise and message.
#3. Pre-sell it earlier. “Do good work and people will come” is a lie.
I once read an ebook called, Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding by Rob Walling. It was about building SaaS startups, but the idea works for books too.
With a clear promise, cover, and sales page (following #1), start promoting from day one.
#4. And I’d order my author copies from Amazon earlier.
Some numbers
I offer Street-Smart Coding as an eBook via Gumroad, and in Kindle and paperback formats in Amazon.
A friend and ex-coworker told me that when we caught up over coffee after many years. Well, I was giving him a paperback copy of my latest book. Shameless plug.
I don’t know why, but our conversation shifted after that line. I had to ask him why he said that.
You have to start from scratch
At college, everybody told him he had a talent for coding. But he was fired from his first job for his performance.
After losing his job, he broke his wedding engagement. He disappointed his parents. He thought he had nothing else to do. Failure wasn’t a stranger. It had become his shadow.
He started as a teacher. He thought he had found “his thing.” But he got fired from that too. Another disappointment.
Then, to try something new, he went back to college. He had to find something. He had to find his calling.
One day on campus, ready to quit, he sat at a table with his head in his hands. The pose of a disappointed, frustrated man.
That’s when he heard something unexpected.
“Which plant grows faster? A tomato plant or a mango tree?”
“A tomato plant,” other students who had joined the table said.
“Which plant gives fruit for longer?” the mysterious voice said. He kept his head down all that time.
“The mango tree,” the students said.
“Exactly! You have to be mango trees. The tomato plant dies after harvest. A mango tree gives mangoes for a lifetime.”
After many failures, that was his wake-up call. At first, he thought it was a wise student. But when my friend raised his head to find out where that voice came from, he found a teacher.
“It was God,” he told me.
That day, he decided to get up and work for himself. If his parents or family were disappointed because he didn’t meet their expectations, that was their problem. Not his.
Lesson 1: Live up to your own expectations.
Lesson 2: You have to start over and over. That’s a skill no class teaches you, only failure and life do.
Lesson 3: Be a mango tree.
That was a moment to start from scratch again, after failing at his first job, his first relationship, and first everything.
Be good at making an extra effort
Being fired from his first job was a sign he wasn’t as smart as he had thought.
Maybe it was impostor syndrome. Trust me, he’s smart.
But after months, he was interviewing at the same place where I was working.
“I know I’m not the smartest, but I’m going to be the most charismatic,” that’s what he thought before the first interview.
That strategy worked. He got the job. But failing at so many things, he was ready to get fired after the first month.
Later, at my workplace, he carried a notebook and wrote down everything. When I asked him about it, he told me, “I had to take away something, at least some notes.”
“After many failures, I learned to read who was really someone who knew and who was just a charlatan. I learned from everyone and I wrote it down.”
He was at the office before clock-in and still there after clock-out. “I had to make an extra effort. It took me 5 hours to finish what others did in 1.” Effort was his secret weapon.
Lesson 4: Take a notebook with you everywhere. (Thank goodness I had a napkin to write down the lessons my friend taught me as soon as our conversation was over.)
Lesson 5: Persistence beats intelligence. If you aren’t the smartest, you have to be the one who puts the most effort.
“A coding problem? Nah! That’s not a problem. I’m used to failure.” Sure, a compilation error was nothing after many disappointments and setbacks.
“That’s why I say I’m an expert at failing.” Wow! We shook hands and went our separate ways. That day, I met a true expert and a wise man—and realized failing isn’t the end.
When code breaks, you can’t simply say, “AI did that.”
You’re responsible for the code you ship. That’s been true from the days of copy-pasting from forums, blog posts, StackOverflow, and now from AI.
AI is fast, but over-reliance makes you lose your mental models and context—just one problem with AI.
The new rule
To protect my skills, I’ve set one rule: Don’t let AI touch your code directly. It might feel unproductive. But it keeps my hands on the wheel.
To test this rule, I recently tried finishing a task using as much AI as possible. While going through the AI-generated code, I came up with another rule:
If I write the code, AI reviews it. And if AI generates the code, I review it.
That way, I use AI while keeping my code writing and reading sharp. Either way, AI is just like a copilot in the cockpit, an extra layer of safety and productivity.
AI is changing the act of coding. Some brag about coding without typing a single line of code, thanks to Claude Code. Whether what AI generates is clean code or garbage, its CEOs aren’t accountable for it. We are.
If you want to sharpen the skills AI can’t replace, check out Street-Smart Coding. It’s the guide I wish I’d had on my journey to becoming a senior coder.
The next step is to take notes. The problem is copying passages without processing them (or letting AI do it). The Zettelkasten method (and my tweaked version) solves that by finding connections between notes.
But today I found another note-taking idea: The 7-word summary.
After a chapter or section, or a whole book, write a 7-word summary. That forces you to condense big ideas into your words.
Tip: For better organization, keep your 7-word summaries in a single place.
I left books where I used to put my phone: desk, couch, and table. Instead of reaching for my phone, now I find myself opening The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle or Jesus’ Son by Dennis Johnson.
Yesterday, I paused on my way to my desk to grab my phone. Midway, I realized my phone wasn’t there anymore. That’s a habit being replaced.
Today, I thought carefully about when I needed my phone. And it was easier to read with books nearby. I even left it behind for a quick errand.
Big changes start with small actions. Mine began with swapping screens for pages.
