How to Become a Better Coder?

I am wondering how I can improve my coding progress. I have learned syntax online as well as offline, I have made many minigames in Python, made several pure CSS images and coded tons of solutions in a programming puzzle game I got installed on my PC.

How can I become a better coder?

Comments

[Anmol Baranwal]

Make a solution for actual users.

Something that actually solves a problem and it will ultimately give you credibility.
There are lots of ideas, but you should work on something that you personally want to solve more than anything else.
I believe it will make you a better coder rather than following tutorials.
Take feedback -> improve and ultimately you will have to write better code so that others can use it.

[Monty Harper]

Agree - and if you need ideas or inspiration for finding your own project to work on, every time you do a simple tutorial project, ask yourself - what would it take to turn this into something I would actually use? I keep a file where I list ideas for apps, and many of them involve turning some exercise I did into a usable app with unique features.

[Anita Olsen 💜]

Excellent ideas! Thank you for sharing! ✨

[Anita Olsen 💜]

Thank you so much for your brilliant comment! ✨

[Oliver]

Read programming books and other people's code. I tried learning from the big O'Reilly reference books. Learnt all the method names and syntax, created games and small websites but didn't really understand how proper software was built. I'm not familiar with any Python titles but from a Ruby POV, I'd be a lot more clueless without Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby, 99 Bottles of OOP and The Well Grounded Rubyist.

Learn design patterns.

Learn to refactor.

I've been told that learning another language helps too.

[Anita Olsen 💜]

Thank you so much!

[𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️]

In short:

• Read other people's code too
• Read articles on advanced topics
• Build complete programs from beginning to end
• Read the wizard book
• If you learn about something, try it out in code

[Anita Olsen 💜]

Thank you! Great tips!

[Kevin Naidoo]

Depends on your career path, whether you want to be a game developer or web developer or some other field.

I am from a web dev background, so I can speak about that industry. Here is a common system you will build as a web developer.

Build An ETL system. Scrape this website:
books.toscrape.com/

Then:

1. Extract books into an XML file. price, title, images, etc...
2. Next, parse the XML one row at a time and push to a Redis queue.
3. Next, build a queue worker that will pull each row from Redis and parse into a dictionary and eventually be stored in a books table.

Once you have the basic system working. Now add other sources, CSV, JSON etc...

• Think about making this solution as loosely coupled and modular as possible. You should be able to detect what the data source is and swap in the correct parser.
• You should validate data.
• You should cater for errors along the chain, log errors and re-queue or gracefully fail.

Build a user interface to pull, paginate and display books. Allow for sorting and filtering.

All the techniques you use here will make you a much better programmer.

Finally read books from industry experts for your language of choice. Learn design patterns and best principals. Go back to the system and improve it as your knowledge grows.

[Anita Olsen 💜]

I am into game development but thank you so much for your reply!

[F. Güngör]

1- learning data structures and algorithms,
2- more practises,
3- read more documents,
4- check github repos,
5- try to be part of an open source application,

[Anita Olsen 💜]

Thank you for the list!