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.
The other day, I reviewed a PR that solved a bug in a Blazor app.
It had only 1 line of code to change a framework setting.
Nothing from another world.
Until I noticed the commit authors in GitHub: Claude was in there too.
I felt like Really?! and closed the browser tab.
That explained the property formatted comment on top of the 1-line change.
Comment I’d trust even less.
If we’re only redirecting anything to a LLM, agent, chat, or whatever, anyone can do the same—that’s not good laziness.
We’ll be replaced anytime soon.
We have to be better.
I’ve had them once or twice in my career.
The first time, it was with a challenging problem, casual Fridays, and monthly birthday celebrations.
The next time, it was with flexible hours, decent salary, and the promise of building any role I wanted.
Each one had more “freedom” than the previous one.
Just more loosen handcuffs.
Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
By Paul’s definition, I’m not a slave anymore.
And an aunt recently taught me a lesson:
Freedom is doing whatever you want, whenever you want.
For months, I’ve had high cholesterol levels.
I’ve tried a low carb diet, more intense workouts, fiber supplements, and all sort of treatments to improve my digestion.
They don’t seem to be working.
Only to learn from my last blood test, there’s a marker that points to a genetic cause.
And to optimize my sleeping routine, I started to go to bed around midnight.
I stopped drinking liquids before dinner and dimmed my room lights.
Only to learn from a chronotype test, I should go to bed way earlier.
Just like Robert Green says in Mastery, you can’t swim against your own current and you can’t be your own resistance.
Don’t fight your nature.
(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.
You can’t predict if a post, book, or any sort of creation will be a hit.
Once you have one, the temptation is trying to replicate it. Same post format. Same book outline. Same type of visuals. That seldom works.
Some of my social media posts have gone viral, bringing book sales. But when I’ve tried to write anything viral by copying a hit, the copies pass unnoticed. No shame or glory.
All art is theft. But as Picasso said copying oneself is pathetic—and doesn’t work.
