Here we’ll be talking about some tips and practices that you can follow to become a great programmer. You must know these things before you plan your target. So let’s see what these five tips are:
Table of Contents
1. Enjoy The Process
Starting with the first one and that would be to enjoy the process more than the end goal or the end result. Why do i say that? Let’s take an example of you solving a problem that requires you to apply DSA skills. So here what happens is that a lot of people just go to stack overflow or some other website. They’ll copy the code and they’ll paste it over there. Thus they will be able to solve that problem. Now there are some problems with this.
Even if you have completed that problem for that time but you didn’t really understand the underlying concept. That’s definitely more important. You should enjoy the process of you going from a brute force approach to an optimal solution. That is really important. If you cannot do that then you will not be able to actually answer a question. Especially if someone will ask you in the interview.
So you might have a great ranking like four or five stars on Codeshare or Codeforces and all. But you would really struggle to answer a question when someone asks you without the need to search online. Even if you go into like things like web development you learn React. All you should really focus on understanding how everything works. Understand how to build a website from scratch. Breaking into components using hooks props and all that. So you should be able to do that without any problem. That is really important.
2. Do Not Panic
Let’s move on to the next one. This one is to not panic. A lot of times what happens is that you’re making a website, an application, or trying to solve a problem and you’re not able to do it. You’re just not able to get to the final optimal solution. So you end up giving up.
Now understand this thing you need to put effort into. I will tell you my own example I was building a website the other day. Building the website took me about two hours but finding out all the errors and the bugs took me about 10 more hours. So it takes a lot of time for you to actually debug something to fix the errors. Eventually, it takes you to actually start and build the website itself. That’s really important for you to understand.
Spend as much time as you can and have patience. Understand that you just need to improve yourself one percent every single day. Do that over a span of 365 days one year to become 37 times better than what you normally were. This is a really powerful concept. Compounding is really important. So yeah this is what I would say. Don’t panic give it time as much as you can and just go with the flow.
3. Understand The Questions
Let’s move on to the third one. Which is to actually understand the question. Read the question properly and then try to answer the question itself. It is necessary that you put in the effort to read the question once, twice, or even thrice. Because you will realize that the question itself has all the answers that you want. If you have any doubts or some confusion the question will most likely solve it.
So spend some time to read the question properly and just try to break everything down. What is asked? What are the input and the output? Also, What is the question saying? What are the requirements? Write it down somewhere and try to visualize everything. How it would actually work? If you can do this you will be able to solve your problems much more easily.
4. Start From Basics
Now the fourth part would be to actually start from the basics. Learn the theory. Spend some time on it. Maybe you are learning DSA to get started with cognitive programming. So before you start cognitive coding you can actually spend some proper time on DSA itself. Learn what are these data structures? how are they implemented? what are these algorithms? how can you use them properly? study it before jumping on to executing it on some program.
Solving some questions is really important. A lot of times what you miss out on are the little details. The nuances of every single algorithm. How are they different from one another? What’s the approach used? So that you must understand.
Make sure that you first learn the basics. Start learning with the theory. This applies to pretty much everything. Let’s say you want to start with learning about javascript and all that you need to properly spend some time and understand the basics of it. Then go into React. To learn the basics focus on the theory part. As well as much as you do on the applied part and by the way you can also take a look at the courses and articles.
5. Multiple Solutions
Moving on to the next one and this would be the fifth and last tip. That is to understand that there are a lot of solutions to the same question. If you are not able to solve a problem or you give up after 2-5 hours or one day of trying to solve that question, just take a look at the editorial section. Find the solutions to it and try to understand how everyone else is trying to use their perspective for that particular question.
If you can do this then it would be great for you to solve questions. It would just be really beneficial for you whenever you go out to solve another question. You will try to look at one question from many perspectives. This is what you can apply. This is how you can make it better. So take a look at all the solutions that are available for you and that way you will be able to better estimate.
Finally, these were the five tips that I would give if you want to start your programming career. This is more into cognitive programming and building your problem-solving skills. If you have any questions you can leave them in the comment section down below.
Know what are the common traps that a beginner falls into- Read Here.