Three Important Lessons for Self-Taught Coders to Level Up
Strategically take your skills to the next level
Coding, programming, development… whatever you call it, the skills you pick up along the way are invaluable and best of all the barrier to entry really is paper thin.
If you’ve learned to code through tutorials, courses, or just scouring the all-knowing Stack Overflow then you’re probably pretty savvy; however, you most likely picked up some bad habits along the way as well.
In this article, I’ll share my top three lessons (well, one is a tool) for self-taught coders who have built a functional foundation, but need a little guidance getting to the next level.
Lesson One: The DRY Method
Don’t Repeat Yourself. That’s what DRY stands for and it’s a critical differentiator between writing code “that works” and writing higher level “legit” code.
There are several levels to writing code that is increasingly DRY, but for now let’s use two questions to guide you.
- Am I repeating code anywhere? If you catch yourself copy/pasting code blocks then you’re probably an offender here. You don’t want your code to read like a novel. Moreover, if you have a lot of repetition in your code, updating it will be a major…
