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.
If creation requires influence, influence starts with copying.
As a kid, I learned to write by copying from textbooks and whiteboards.
Then in college, I learned to code by copying code blocks from textbooks and whiteboards too.
When I read about James Altucher’s bankruptcy stories, Choose Yourself, and his storytelling, I said “I want to write like that.”
He’s probably the non-fiction writer I’ve read and copied the most.
And by extension, I’ve copied the ones he copied too.
Nobody starts out original.
For almost all my books, I can point to someone and something else where I stole ideas from.
By “stole,” I mean inspiration.
Creativity is also copying, transforming, and combining.
#1. Ideas.txt. When I find an idea I’d like to try on my own work, I add it to a plain-text file with a timestamp and a source. So far, this list is full of book promotion ideas. Apart from my daily post, writing books is what keeps me busy these days.
#2. Curiosity.txt. I don’t want my inner child die. I want to keep asking questions and following my curiosities. That’s why every time a crazy or curious question pops up, I add it to another list. A curiosity.txt. No particular format. Just one question per line.
The other day, I wonder how learning a language with a different script is. Well, that went into my curiosity list.
One of the most common criticisms of my books is that I didn’t “come up” with most of the advice I give.
Well… of course I didn’t! You really think I’m going to compete with Aristotle and The Buddha? This advice has been around for thousands of years. I simply repackaged it in interesting and novel ways, changed the emphasis on a few points, and added a couple of my own ideas to spice things up.
That made me think of love songs.
All love songs are:
“I love you and can’t wait to be with you”
“I love you, but there’s someone or something between us”
“I’m with someone else, but the one I truly love is you”
You could probably come up with more categories.
Just because all love songs fall into one of those, it doesn’t make you put your AirPods down and say, “Oh I already hear that.”
And we’ve been writing and listening to love songs since we have human experience.
Creativity is repackaging old ideas in new ways.
It’s playing with fixed structures. It’s stealing some multiple sources.
It’s filtering old ideas throught our lenses and stories.
Every content medium comes with their own reader’s behavior.
You can’t complaint about people not reading your social media posts.
Because people don’t read on social media.
They skim and scan down feeds.
Just take a look at someone “reading” on Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok:
Scroll, scroll… Go back for a few seconds, like… Scroll, scroll…
When someone watches a video, they stay for a minute at most… But when someone reads your work, they are staying for potentially hours or days. They invest active time and energy into understanding your ideas, which then rattles around in their brain for the rest of the day. They are also making a decision to change, and letting you influence them.
Blog posts or essays live longer, and have more room to share deep ideas than tweets, carousels, or social media posts.
Not every single day is productive.
Sometimes writing a daily post is a piece of cake.
Other times, a daily post is just to avoid breaking the chain.
In recent months, I went through an episode of stress that disrupted my sleep.
Writing didn’t flow for quite a while.
No aha moments. No rushing to capture a thunder of creativity.
To spark the joy of writing, I started a secret book project.
No deadlines. No announcements.
No other expectations than enjoying the process.
Since then, I’ve written one story after a casual encounter at a grocery store, another story after running errands on Halloween all day long, and a piece of poetry for the first time… and I’ve had to stop doing the dishes to write down ideas before I forget them.
Now that I connect the dots, I’ve done my best writing when I feel free.
To get your juices flowing, you need to sit down to write without pressure, guilt, or judgment. Just play!
