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.
I’ve struggled with finding one passion and niching down.
Until I find out it’s OK to have multiple interests.
It was reassuring to learn there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m just driven to multiple interests.
Recently, to avoid the niching down trap, I’ve switched to “umbrella” all my interests under a mission or projects.
One of them is writing books.
A book is a perfect project to combine talents.
Design for the cover.
Research for the content. Storytelling for making it compelling. Copywriting for the sales page. Foreign languages for translations.
Marketing for promoting it.
Write as if nobody is reading and keep writing because you don’t know who’s doing it.
That’s the one of the mantras that has kept me writing for years.
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. A case against syntax obsession. Because real impact comes from skills outside your IDE.
After 3 months of work, today was the day to test a brand-new invoicing module for a hardware shop.
We’re building a Blazor app to charge companies based on active users and license fees.
By “we” means a team of contractors I’m part of.
At the beginning of every month, the CEO creates invoices and charges cards manually.
Zero automation.
One by one.
It takes him two or three days of work.
Yes, in the 21st century.
Today, the CEO decided to compare his manual process to the new module.
On the first attempt to charge a card, we got a “Not Found” response code from the payment gateway API.
It turns out, on Octopus Deploy, our CI/CD tool, the API url and credentials were missing.
Someone added it by clicking “Add to the List” under the Project Variables.
But they forgot to hit “Save.”
Adding to the list isn’t the same as saving.
Who would have known it?
Arrgggg!!!
Fifteen minutes later, after a deployment, we got the same “Not Found” on the logs.
This time, we forgot to append a “/” at the end of the API url on Octopus Deploy.
From https://acoolapi/something/rest to https://acoolapi/something/rest/.
Noticed the subtle difference?
Well, it seems .NET built-in HttpClient’s SendAsync() does a simple string manipulation to build urls.
I wanted to find the source code to check my assumption, but it was too late and I’m lazy—And this post is getting long.
I guess today I learned to hit Save and append slashes on urls.
Even with AI, troubleshooting matters more than ever. Street-Smart Coding shows you a roadmap with 30 lessons—troubleshooting is one of them—to help you build future-proof skills.
Is it still worth to code or should I learn to use ai instead?
What do you actually need to be able to do without AI?
Today I went to Reddit for inspiration and found almost the same question all over the place: Should I still learn to code?
Yes! Here’s why:
#1. Coding teaches you transferable skills. Like problem solving and troubleshooting.
#2. Coding teaches you how to learn any skill. You can’t simply learn all “coding” at once. You have to divide a skill into subskills and other learning strategies.
#3. AI needs real skills. When things breaks, you can’t vibe your way by prompting “Fix this” or “Don’t make mistakes.”
#4. AI is only making code generation faster. There’s more to be a coder or software engineer than writing lines of code.
#6. AI can’t be hold accountable. When things break, you can’t simply say, “AI did that.”
#7. Foundational skills won’t change much. There will be something else “replacing” coders. Yesterday, it was no-code, UML. Today is LLMs or agents. Tomorrow, chances are it will be something else. Problem decomposition, encapsulation, abstraction…Those fundamentals will be the same and matter more than ever.
“AI” isn’t the most important skill. It takes 10 years and a weekend to master coding with AI: 10 years to learn coding and a weekend to learn the most popular AI tool these days.
To build skills that last a career, check out Street-Smart Coding. The roadmap I wish I had on my coding journey.
