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.
Running out of ideas is a myth. Your mind is far more expansive than you imagine. Some days I feel I could write to the ends of the earth and still not want to stop. Other days, even a single paragraph is a struggle.
For over 700 days, I’ve kept my daily streak, with more effort some days than others.
But a commitment to publish pushes me find anything to share:
A quote, a mundane story, a reaction to a post, a lesson, a coding trick. Anything.
When you look at the world through some writer’s eyes, you find material or inspiration anywhere.
That’s the main effect of writing and enough proof that running out of ideas is a myth.
In case you missed it, I’m writing Street-Smart Coding in the Age of AI, the prequel of Street-Smart Coding and book #3 in my Street-Smart Coding Collection.
It’s a short and actionable guide to help you leverage AI without becoming dependent on it. You can preorder your ebook copy starting at just $1.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. AI agents for coding? Nah! What about feeding them with satellite images to find archaeological sites? That’s how a Maya site was (re)discovered (9min).
#3. With the power of AI at our fingertips, it’s time to return to the humanities and social sciences, time to return to Socrates (5min). It’s time to let machine build a world we humans envision.
#4. I don’t use AI for writing. It’s too sacred to outsource it to AI. Because writing is a thinking tool (7min).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Preorder your copy of Street-Smart Coding in the Age of AI. A short and actionable guide to leverage AI without losing your skills.
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.
