Programming Tips and Tricks for Beginners
By Bright Mukonesi
Doing programming right now can be one of the best decisions. With all the free time and free resources online, you’d have no excuse to not become a world-class programmer.
As good as it may feel to finally say “I am a programmer”, the path to that phrase can be more of a mountain and less of a road.
Some people wake up with ‘I want to start programming’ but go back to bed with ‘Programming is not my thing anyway’. It is not that they are losers or undetermined individuals, I would say it is because they may have started off on the wrong foot.
Famous quote by Natsu Dragneel: “Don’t give up, the beginning is always the hardest” may be fired at you at this moment.
On the other hand, there are those of us who love shortcuts for everything. It’s called working smart. Here are some of the tips and tricks that may help you as a beginner or intermediate programmer.
- Take your time.
Many people think that to learn to program you must master the syntax of a certain programming language. Although it may apply to pro developers who have been coding for years, this may not be entirely true.
Trying to cram what variables, lists or functions are, probably won’t be of help if you don’t know where and when to use them.
Luckily, apprenticeship was introduced back in the stone age. With youtube videos and blog article tutorials explaining how to build simple apps, you can learn the fundamentals of technology and how to use it concurrently in minutes.
2. Use the power of the search engine
If you think programmers are some gods who write alien language into a computer all from their heads, give me the honor of surprising you. Programmers are just the best googlers. Items ranging from errors to “How to’s” can be found on google. For instance, whereas someone would pay a couple of thousand dollars to learn a new language, I googled “Learn flutter” and in one month I had built my first flutter which is up and running fine.
Just because someone may know how to google better he or she is referred to as a programmer.
3. Try to be independent
As much as it’s good to learn from other experienced developers, avoid as much as possible being spoon-fed. When you get an error, try working your way around it instead of forwarding it to an expert just shortly after your encounter with it. This will help a lot with your mastery skills and improve your response to problems in programming.
4. Go deeper rather than going wide
A programmer who knows many languages may be seen as the best but this may not be a hundred percent true. Knowing many languages does not make you a better programmer. If you give a child all the farm tools you can think of, that won’t make the child a good farmer.
A good programmer is measured by how efficient, fast, and dynamic he can be when it comes to solving problems. My advice would be to go deeper with the language you prefer and try to master it.
5. Exercise your brain
As tempting as it may be to always use shortcuts like copying and pasting code, try to exercise your brain muscles more. Type in the code manually because this will help you master syntax and structure of the language you’re using. You can also train your logical thinking using toy problems from the most common site: codewars. The toy problems help a lot to increase your logical thinking and push you to always find alternatives to doing the same task.
6. Keep up to date with the latest technologies.
As much as you may want to focus on the technology that you’re familiar with, you must be aware of upcoming trends too. Take a look at mobile development, for instance, java and kotlin were used to develop android apps while swift for ios. In 2015 google introduced flutter which has now started overtaking its predecessors. Companies are switching to flutter slowly so as a potential employee, you ought to keep up with the pace of change in trends.
Remember you can always do this by using the power of the search engine.
For a parting shot, as a programmer or an aspiring one, you have to be vigorously smart. Practice over practice makes perfect. Speak to that computer till it responds back appropriately.
What other programming tips and tricks do you know that can help beginners?Leave a comment below
