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.
For the last phase, I offered free copies as gifts to “advance readers” in exchange for an honest review.
As a fan of 10-idea lists, I wrote a list of 10 e-friends, ended up messaging 12, and heard back from 6. Two read it but weren’t eligible to review. (Amazon requires $50 in purchases within the last year.) Two managed to leave reviews. One was rejected, the other approved. A 5-star review. Hooray!
Here’s the review on Amazon:
Short but sweet
One sale plus one review. Proof that the experiment is working.
“Short but sweet” shows you don’t need thousands of pages to write a book that matters.
One of the tasks was coming up with title ideas. One of the participants had an immigration practice helping people move to Australia. While he waited for the perfect title, I suggested Aussie Job and follow-ups like Aussie Colleges and Aussie Marriages.
I don’t know which title he chose or if he even wrote the book. I just checked Amazon and there’s no Aussie Job. Insert shrugging emoji.
As a fan of 10-idea lists, that exercise was a piece of cake. It was just another daily prompt for ideas.
That workshop pushed me to keep writing my 10 ideas daily.
3.
Don’t wait for a perfect book title, blog post subject, or business idea.
Chasing the “perfect” idea leaves you blocked, waiting for inspiration. Aim for 10 guilt-free bad ideas. Among those you’ll find a decent one that leads you to the right idea.
Put your work out there. Show it. If people like it, they will engage with it and remember it. Otherwise, they won’t.
I’ve published over 600 posts over the years (half of them reposted on Medium and dev.to). Not every single post is a hit. Good ones stand out. People like, comment, and share them. Others go without “fame or glory.”
Then the work is to have more bad ideas, find the least bad, and share them. Rinse and repeat.
Sharif Shameem shared a similar idea. He calls it, Aadil’s Law, named after a friend:
The amount of stupidity you’re willing to tolerate is directly proportional to the quality of ideas you’ll eventually produce
Be willing to look stupid. Write 10 bad ideas every day and let the good ones emerge.
Take public transportation at rush hour. You’ll notice a clear pattern.
More than half the people are heads down, headphones on, scrolling.
If we don’t take care of our health, we’ll be depressed, sleep-deprived, deaf, people with the attention span of a fish.
Taking care of our health is the first step towards reinvention. After commuting, scrolling, junk food, and poor sleep, we lack the energy and drive to be creative and have new ideas. That’s when AI will eat us alive, when we’re too drained to imagine and create.
#3. Last week, another npm package was infected. The interesting part? Someone stole the npm token by injecting a prompt into a GitHub issue (10min). SQL injection isn’t the #1 vulnerability anymore.
Beyond the basics, Brian’s recent videos taught me to aim for a lower heart rate before sleep. Try journaling, taking deep breaths, or meditation. Slow down before going to bed.
