#1. I didn’t use magazines, but I learned coding by typing examples from textbooks. It isn’t as fast as using an LLM. It was something else entirely (3min).
To celebrate my blog’s 8-year anniversary, last week I ran an AMA on dev.to. In case you missed it, here are my favorite questions (9min).
(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.
For weeks, I’ve been struggling with a personal decision.
I’ve come up with scenarios, built a decision tree, and used AI to analyze my options. It’s made me so anxious, it’s often the first thing I think of when I wake up.
Yesterday, wanting a different perspective, I called my best friend to ask him what he would do in my shoes.
Among other things, he told me, “you can’t think like an engineer all the time.” He was right! I don’t want to screw this up, and I’ve approached it like a coder. But life is mostly about daring and taking risks.
“Live without regrets,” he said near the end of our call. That’s what I needed to hear because I was about to give up.
I challenge myself to make every book different.
So far, I’ve experimented with formats: a choose-your-own-adventure, a 10-point list, and a one-idea-per-chapter book.
From Write Useful Books, I learned to start non-fiction at Chapter 1.
It’s like dropping viewers into the TV show drama instead of starting with a director’s commentary.
Crafting clean code alone won’t save you or make you stand out. That’s not the real edge.
Why this book?
When I started, I thought my only job was writing code.
I obsessed over syntax and lines of code.
I ignored meetings, calls, and emails.
I only wanted to code, code, and code.
But I was wrong.
After trial and error, and even getting fired, I realized:
Code alone won’t save you.
It won’t make you stand out either.
It’s always something beyond symbols: The skills outside the IDE.
That realization inspired my next book: Street-Smart Coding Manifesto.
It’s for junior and intermediate coders—and my younger self—who want to create impact beyond code.
Preview of the first ~10 pages
What’s inside?
It’s a short guide, you can finish over coffee, to the mindset shifts and skills that create real impact.
It includes 17 lessons to help you become a street-smart coder:
Make your mentors ageless, and, at minimum, you’ll gain one awesome new trait: the humility to learn from anyone, no matter their relative position to you in this life.
