How I Correct Mistakes When Practicing Foreign Languages

03 Jan 2025 #misc

It’s discouraging when a teacher corrects your mistakes in every phrase. It makes you want to stop speaking.

I’ve had all types of teachers:

The ones who cut you off in the middle of every sentence to correct you
The ones who write corrections on a whiteboard
The ones who don’t correct at all

We need the right balance when learning a new language.

If we’re not corrected, we keep making the same mistakes. But if we get corrected all the time, we lose confidence.

After taking many language courses and doing plenty of language exchanges, here’s my strategy for correcting mistakes:

Instead of cutting off your language partner (or student) in the middle of a sentence to point out a mistake, restate the sentence or ask a follow-up question without the mistake.

For example, if someone says “my brother don’t like apples,” you could say:

You mean your brother doesn’t like apples?
Why is that? Why doesn’t your brother like apples?

You’re correcting the mistake while keeping the conversation going and without discouraging the other person with too many corrections.

If You're Starting a Creative Project, Remember This Law

02 Jan 2025 #misc

90% of everything is crap.

And I’m not making that up. It’s Sturgeon’s Law.

That’s not discouraging. It’s relieving, at least for me.

It lowers our expectations when starting any creative project, like writing or painting, for the first time.

Our first posts, paintings, or pictures will be in that 90%

My first post was in the 90% of crap.

I wrote my first blog post back in 2018. And “post” is a strong word. It was a word vomit. I dumped a bunch of words into a document and published it online. I still keep that post unedited to remind me how I started.

My first LinkedIn post was in the 90% of crap too.

I made all LinkedIn sins possible in a single post:

Only an external link.
Hashtags and emojis.
No whitespace for readability.
Zero formatting for mobile devices.

The way out of that 90%?

Keep showing up and keep improving.

Think of every repetition, post or painting, like a small experiment. Small experiments give you room to explore, to break the rules, to see what happens. If an experiment failed, you’ll always have a new experiment the next day.

How do I know I’m improving?

If you find your first repetitions cringe-worthy, you’re improving.

If, after months of repetitions, you don’t cringe when going back to your first posts or paintings, you haven’t improved much. You need to do more experiments.

90% of everything is crap. That’s encouraging. We only need a bit of effort to get ahead of that 90%.

Best of 2024: My Year in Review

01 Jan 2025 #misc

If I had to define my 2024 in one word, it would be: Change.

In 2023, I got burned out and sick. And when I was laid off in early 2024, I felt both worried and relieved. I needed some time off.

That layoff taught me valuable lessons about life, career, and money.

My coding side

2024 felt like a rollercoaster.

After getting laid off and sending dozens of applications, I decided to take some time off to take care of my health. A mini-retirement.

After the radio silence and a few “thanks, maybe later” replies, I started freelancing with a small software agency. That helped me stay afloat for a month or two without running out of savings.

In 2024, I doubled down on my online presence.

I created two video courses on Udemy: here and here. I hired Microsoft’s Copilot as my assistant to create the promotional materials. All the content and recordings were made by me. A human.

My career reflections

Being laid off gave me time to reflect on my career after over 10 years of non-stop work.

I wrote about the lessons my first job taught me about coding and life and shared 8 lessons for new developers, like in a free mentoring session.

Last year the coding world went nuts when Devin, “the first AI software engineer,” was released and I gave my predictions for coding in 2034.

If you’re reading this from the future, let me know if I nailed it with my predictions. By the way, do you have flying cars or are you still dreaming about them?

I created a 7-day email course to share the lessons I wish I had known to survive a career in software engineering. I share what I’d tell my younger self starting his first professional coding job.

And I moved my Monday Links series to an email list. Every other week, you won’t get Monday Links, but Friday Links in your inbox. For free.

If you missed any of them, here are my five most read posts from 2024:

My writing side

I will remember 2024 as the year I went all in on my writing.

After writing for more than 5 years, I took my first writing class. That gave me momentum to keep the writing ball rolling. I even created a tag /misc to write about everything outside programming and software engineering.

Starting on November 1st, I began writing daily on my blog. Those daily posts fueled my writing everywhere else.

LinkedIn

After months of inactivity in 2023, I revived my LinkedIn account from Zombieland.

I challenged myself to write 100 short-form native posts. I started with 1 post a week, then 2, then 3… I doubled my follower count and had two or three “viral” posts. Those are vanity metrics. But the main benefit? The fear of writing in social media is gone!

It turns out LinkedIn is not that cringy when we follow the right strategy.

dev.to

In 2024, I kept reposting some of my posts on dev.to.

The dev.to team featured three of my posts in the Top7 posts of the week. These ones:

Parting Thought

Taking some time off to take care of my health was the best decision I made in 2024. Being physically healthy spreads to all other areas of our life.

And definitely, Monday mornings don’t feel the same when you wake up to do something you love.

Thanks for reading, and happy coding in 2025!

Don’t miss my best of 2023, 2022, and 2021.

The Best Way to Get Better at Writing Code Isn't Just Writing More Code

31 Dec 2024 #coding

More than 10 years ago, I started my real coding journey with a Google search: “How to be a better developer.”

University had taught me a lot of things I didn’t need. I had to teach myself the ones I needed.

I went down the rabbit hole. That search gave me lots of ideas and inspiration:

Write specs
Write unit tests
Document your code
Learn Functional Programming
Write self-documenting code
Read Clean Code
Start a blog

Yeah! Starting a blog. That inspired me to start this very blog. I didn’t know I was about to enjoy writing so much.

Those are good ideas. But what has worked best for me is reading other people’s code.

In fact, an ex-coworker taught me that lesson. That was his secret technique, even though he was our team’s architect, and we thought he didn’t need to study anymore.

So read more code. But read actively. You can’t read code like fiction, glancing over words on a page:

Find a medium-sized library you use or find interesting
Download its source code
Compile and run it
Look at its unit tests
Debug one feature

See how the library authors implemented a feature.

If you find a new keyword, look it up. If you find a new data structure, look it up too. If you find a new method in the standard library, again, look it up.

Once you understand how a feature is implemented, try to recreate a bare-bones version without looking at the original code. That’s how you make sure you truly understand the code.

I used this strategy when I learned about the Specification pattern. I found a library implementing that pattern. I downloaded and read it. Once I got the main idea, I wrote my own dummy implementation. Then I wrote a post about it.

Don’t just write more code to get better at coding. Read more code. Actively.

Here's the Best Productivity Hack I Learned in 2024

30 Dec 2024 #productivity

It wasn’t a time management technique. It wasn’t the Eisenhower Matrix, Eat That Frog, or the Pareto Principle.

It was an energy management technique: eating better.

Eating better. Eating for energy.

Eating better means no processed foods, no carbs, and no sugar. We all know we should eat better. Nothing new! Right?!

But from “Glucose Revolution” by Jessie Inchauspé, eating better means reordering how we eat, without sacrificing those delicious candies.

Salads first. Proteins and fats second. And carbs and sweets last.

Reordering how we eat keeps our glucose spikes under control

Glucose spikes are the reason why we feel tired all day and hungrier even after eating. We have too much sugar in our bloodstream.

Simply by reordering how I ate, I got my energy back:

I don’t get sleepy after lunch.
I don’t drag my feet to get through my afternoons.
I lost ~4kg in two months without much effort.

Also, to control our glucose spikes, we could walk for 10-15 minutes after eating. The longer, the better.

Thanks to my new diet, my afternoons are as productive as my mornings. No more feeling like a zombie at the end of the day.

We are what we put in our bodies. And if we eat well, we think well.

Just Some Code