Ask HN: Time coding vs time improving your coding skills?

1 points by wepple 12y ago ↗ HN

I'm fairly new to programming; it's been a longtime hobby I'm hoping to turn into a profession.<p>I get really bad analysis paralysis and often find myself poring through books on text editors, design patterns, clean coding etc - at the end of the day I've got a bunch of theory and have built absolutely nothing. Or to the extreme: Perhaps I should learn Haskell and write it in that?<p>conversely, sometimes I'll bash away at the keyboard coding up an idea I've had, not really being mindful of the fact that I'm repeating myself a heck of a lot or doing things horribly inefficiently - and that searching for that python library of vim shortcut would save me half a day.<p>Anyone got any advice about how they approach this? How do you keep decent momentum up, but know when it's time to stop and sharpen your axe?

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theslay 12y ago ↗

I think that's how most people start out. You're not really doing it all wrong.Coding with much momentum requires experience(which will come). To add to that, you don't always need to try to code by looking at the screen. Take a paper and pencil, try to understand what you are trying to accomplish. Make sure you build a few connections from the problem to the goal and eliminate all possible "wrong paths" in trying to achieve the goal. Trust me, this really works well and can save some time.You can always look it up on google, stack exchange,etc. But in all reality, most developers tend to hit roadblocks and spend quite a while on a maybe smaller problem.