Sharpen your coding skills

In this blog, I want to share with you, how to sharpen your coding skills as a developer. Because believe it or not coding is a very ephemeral skill, meaning if you don’t keep practicing or trying to grow in it, you can lose it. It’s like going to the gym and trying to build muscle. If you stop for some time you will lose your gains and strength. So, you have to keep on coding consistently.

Reasons to sharpen your coding skills

Now, what happens in a company’s work environment as a software developer is that, you will be assigned a project that gets you busy on certain skills and those skills may not challenge your coding skills or improve your logical thinking. Perhaps, you may have to learn a service like Amazon web services or Microsoft Azure. Although that will be productive, it’s not going to improve your logical ability or coding skills.

Or for example, you may have to switch out a framework that requires you to move around a lot of boilerplate code. These kinds of things can take a lot of time. And depending on the kind of company you work for; you could be stuck on a project where you don’t get to practice your coding skills for months.

And during these times I bet you, your coding skills will suffer if you’re not practicing on the side. But it won’t be a big deal if you’ve been coding consistently. When you keep practicing you should be able to sharpen up fairly quickly and become a senior developer. However, I’ve seen developers that worked for the same company for 10 years, where they developed the initial project and stuck around supporting the product for years and eventually got too comfortable.

And this could be a very dangerous position for a programmer because your growth will stop on the technical path. If you stick around too long, you will find it difficult to transition to a new role at that point.

So, unless you had been coding and practicing on the side and working on personal projects and that sort of thing, you will improve personally as a developer.

Tips on sharpening coding skills

So, what’s the best way to keep your coding skills sharp? Well, it’s all about consistently training your logical thinking through coding. What exactly do I mean by that? Well, coding logic at its core comes from the fundamental building blocks of any programming language. Such as loops, if-else statements, recursion, method-level coding, and exception handling, really. These are the granular components and seem pretty basic but they need to be practiced constantly.

You can learn all the frameworks and design patterns in the world. But if you have the functionality you’re trying to implement in a product and you’re having trouble trying to figure out whether this given loop will have an array out-of-bounds error or an off-by-one error. And if you’re stuck in something that basic like that, you won’t be able to focus on the larger picture.

Because your mind is so over-occupied with the granular stuff. So your goal ideally should be to get to a point where your mind is focused on the larger picture of the project. Whereas you should be able to just think through in your head about the granular components, and your fingers must do all the work. Now, for senior developers who get good at coding, that’s really what happens with them, their fingers start doing most of the work, at least the granular stuff.

So it’s very important to constantly challenge yourself with programming challenges that test your fundamental knowledge of the programming language and improve your coding logic fairly quickly even if you haven’t coded for a while. These programming challenges will keep you sharp and interview-ready at all times and they’re fun to work with. Anyway, with that being said I’d like to wrap up and I just want to let you know that stay sharp, remain a dangerous programmer, and keep coding.

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