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.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. When coding was the bottleneck, we used 2-pizza teams. Now, with AI writing decent code, we have to rethink team organization. AI is turning teams into 1-pizza teams (7min) while creating new roles.
#2. Most of us coders are problem solvers at heart. The worst part is that makes us addicted to being useful (6min).
#3. We are at a turning point of our career as coders (5min). Software’s first “season” is over. But the next one will be “more interesting, more economically valuable, and more mentally stimulating than we can imagine right now.”
#4. Anthropic found that over-relying on AI leads to a “statistically significant decrease in mastery.” A truth everybody already knows (2min).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Street-Smart Coding, 30 lessons to help you code like a pro. From Googling to clear communication, it covers the lessons you don’t learn in tutorials. It’s now out on Kindle and paperback on Amazon.
In the days of StackOverflow, we had to verify answers. Now, too often, we accept AI’s output without question.
Catching AI red-handed
Today, in another adventure with AI, I asked Copilot to turn a couple of SQL table definitions into mapping classes for Entity Framework Core. It was the classical 1-to-many relationship.
The problem came when I asked it to generate an API endpoint to store a parent record with a bunch of child records. Something like: create a parent record, then read a table to create its children.
Its first solution was to persist the parent record. Then inside a loop, persist every child record. The classical N+1 problem. Well, the inverse one. Arrggg!
When I prompted it to change it, saying there was no need for the loop, it replied with a “Yes, you can simplify it that way.” Caught you Copilot!
Why coding skills still matter
The N+1 problem was something I could find on the spot.
Now imagine how many AI answers we blindly accept without question. When coding, documenting, researching, testing…
Coding skills still matter. Without them, we wouldn’t even notice the problem.
To offload my mind, here’s a single-take brain dump of random ideas I’ve found recently:
#1. Nothing can’t be done by thinking alone. That’s a line I found in Secrets to Thrive in Life, a book my mom annotated and left behind.
#2. Don’t network. Write instead. Your words have wider reach than a networking activity or event. Someone shared in Medium.
#3. A fit, shredded body is a status symbol. A fancy house, car, and watch can be financed, but not a healthy body. Allegedly Arnold Schwarzenegger.
#4. The bigger the project, the strongest the Resistance. Resistance being the personification of doubt, procrastination, and self-sabotage. From the one and only, Steven Pressfield.
#5. When stressed/anxious/overwhelm, create. Someone else in Medium.
#6. You don’t owe the Internet consistency. It’s OK to disappear from social media. A creator I follow in LinkedIn.
#7. Journaling can be as simple as writing one line a day. Ryan Holiday from his YouTube channel.
Vibecoding was bad. But now, AI-assisted coding seems fine.
Nothing sparks more heated discussions than asking coders about best practices. Today, someone I follow on LinkedIn shared his weekend AI experiment to build an app. As usual, “passionate” coders threw virtual stones.
To turn the conversation around, he asked for our unpopular opinions about AI-assisted coding. To avoid burying mine in a comment, here they are:
#1. Use AI as a calculator. Only useful if you know what you’re doing.
#2. Don’t let AI touch code directly. That’s my go-to rule for coding with AI. Unproductive? Maybe. But it forces me to decompose problems and validates AI-generated code.
If I write code, AI reviews it. If AI generates it, I review it.
According to a recent Sonar survey, only 48% of respondents always check AI-assisted code before committing. #yolo By reviewing, I’m already in the top 50%.
AI alone won’t make you a great coder. It only amplifies the skills you already have. That’s why I wrote Street-Smart Coding—because you need more than syntax to stand out.
After a week of typing, my next book’s first draft is done.
This month, I’m running a book experiment: I’m turning a hit post into a short guide, but backwards.
Today I transcribed the last chapters. Yes, I handwrote some of the chapters. The draft is 7,084 words across 24 pages in Google Docs. That’s the minimum page count for an Amazon KDP paperback. Formatting and front/back matter will add more pages.
Even when hitting a small victory, like finishing the first draft, my inner voice speaks louder. “Do I have something good?”“Are people going to like it?” I have to trust the process and focus on the next task.
Now that the first draft is done, here’s what I’m doing:
Take distance. I’m letting the draft sit for a few days to read it with fresh eyes.
Replace placeholders. To finish my first draft in a single pass, I used “XXX” for places where I needed to fill in details later.
