This is the start of mini posts that I will be writing every week about whatever the week has been about and what hasn’t it been. Your boi is a hard working, employed boi so probably 3000 words long essay style blogs will become a thing of the past and I will learn to compress information down to really important bits for once in 2020. We just lost Irfan Khan. I am not sure I am handling it all too well. Nonetheless, we carry on against the droning deafening hollow of life.
So someone on Twitter asked me this question, right and ….
I had faced something similar in my life too a long time back. I got out of it because of the help and guidance from my mentors. Hence to “pay it forward” so as to say so I wrote a damn good answer for that person. While they appreciated my answer or not, I was pretty sure I did. So I did what most people on Stack Overflow without upvoting. Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V.
Here’s the answer!
This is one of the questions the most revered questions everyone faces in the programming world. It’s called reaching the programming plateau. What is a programming plateau? So you know the syntax, you know how the language works, you know you are good at it. But, you don’t know how to go ahead from this point forward. How to level up? It’s like knowing how to operate a screwdriver in theory. You practise the movements in the air, but you never know what you can use it for.
If that’s you, then these 3 points to get you above your plateau no matter what language it is:
- Your can start practising Data Structures and Algos. It will effectively help you think of solutions faster and more efficiently in that language. With these exercises, you can help condition your brain better and be more productive.
- Build a relatively large project with the framework of that language. For example in Python, there are literally loads of project to do and frameworks to try like Scrapy, Flask, Pandas, scikit-learn, Numpy, Django. The list is endless. Pick a field you like and build a great project in it
- Last but the best option, Contribute to Open-Source! Contributing to projects is the way to learn your X programming language the hard way from the grassroots where people are writing production-level code and you can greatly increase your quality of code overall. I can’t stress on this enough. How open-source could be really important in the long run whether you are a student or 10 year experienced professional.
Woah, I am half proud of myself of summarising it so well. I was in the same situation in my second year and read this reddit post on r/programming. Hope this helps you all!
Till then live in the mix.