Level Up As A Programmer With This One Technique!

Key Takeaways

foreign what I want to do in this video is outline for you a simple strategy that I've been using recently that has really increased the amount of code that I can write in a day and just the efficiency and productivity I have when I am writing code now this strategy relies on the premise that I'm going to outline for you here which is that what becomes difficult when you get into larger projects or just become more experienced as a programmer is not writing the code itself it's knowing what code to write for me personally if you were to give me a list of a bunch of functions or classes or kind of some detailed requirements right you gave me what exactly I needed to do a bunch of discrete tasks I could complete those tasks pretty quickly and I would just continue going through them and spend the entire time pretty much writing code however if you don't give me that and instead you give me kind of a very very large task that's not broken down that requires a ton of thinking up front Etc that's going to take me a lot longer to complete now I know that seems obvious but the reason I'm stating this is that a lot of people especially as they kind of get into the intermediate and advanced stage of programming they forget that thinking about your code and designing your code is a completely separate thing from actually writing the code itself if you're constantly switching between these activities spending a few minutes writing a few minutes thinking a few minutes writing a few minutes thinking you're going to notice that you're extremely delayed you're not very efficient and you're constantly context switching and it's hard to kind of get into the Flow State and really get a lot done so what this strategy is that I want to share with you here is to really separate the thinking of your code from the writing of your code now I know that seems obvious I'm going to share with you exactly how I do that and kind of what my day looks like when I'm kind of getting into a code base and writing some code so the first thing I do every single morning when I wake up if I'm going to be coding that day depending on what task I'm doing is I think of overall what the goal is for the day right what do I want to get done what should be completed by the end of the day now that could be something fairly large that could be an entire feature that could be maybe a few different files that could be maybe some automated testing doesn't matter I think okay what is it that actually needs to get done once I have that I immediately start breaking this down into as many discrete tasks as possible now there could be many iterations of doing this but for example if I'm writing let's say kind of a social media feature where people can follow each other they can view each other's profiles let's say I'm doing something like that I immediately start thinking okay what are the separate components of this task well I need a way of tracking who's following who I need a way to follow someone I need a way to unfollow someone I need a way to get someone's profile Etc okay there you go I've just split this into four separate tasks now for each of those individual tasks again you repeat the process and split those into even more discrete tasks once I've done that now for each of those tasks I say okay do I need a file for this do I need a function for this do I need a class for this once I've done that I stub all of those different things now what I mean by stub is all right for example an empty file or an empty folder or an empty function or an empty fast doesn't really matter what it is but I'll write kind of an empty version of it so just the function signature just the class name so that I have an idea of what it is that I need to do now once I have all of this stubbing done now I need to pick a relative order that I want to complete the task in so I'll you know just order it I can do a comment one two three on all the different functions or the different um what do you call files usually I just remember the order that I need to go in and then that's when you actually start thinking about how you're going to complete the individual task so now I have a function in here I have a class here blah blah blah okay I need to write this individual function let me spend some time before I write the function thinking about what does this function need to do and again breaking it into as many discrete tasks as possible until you're at the point where you're almost at individual lines of code or small blocks of code that you need to write now at this point and only at this point is when I actually start writing any code now I have a very clear picture of what I need to do in my brain I've thought about different edge cases I've thought about essentially what the problem is and how I'm going to solve it and now I can just go and code this extremely fast now obviously yes I'm going to make mistakes I have to test this code all kinds of stuff still goes into it I may have to stop and think about it again but generally this drastically increases the output that I can have because now I'm not constantly writing a few lines of code stopping for a few minutes thinking writing a few lines stopping for a few minutes thinking I'm already in the flow and I can go for 20 30 40 whatever amount of time in a row just writing code and just being on the keyboard and really kind of flowing with each keystroke if that makes sense to you so that is really the strategy that I wanted to outline in this video I know for a lot of you you probably already do this this is an obvious thing but I know a lot of people that watch this channel are just beginners you guys are looking for some guidance and ways to kind of level up so I wanted to share this with you in case it could give you some value and allow you to kind of change the way you think about writing code key takeaway here is that thinking about and designing your code is a separate task from writing the code itself and as much as you can separate those two things you you're going to really increase your efficiency and allow yourself to get into that flow state where you can get more code down now I know a lot of people complain about writing more code whenever I say more code I get people in the comments saying well we don't want more code you want less code Etc what I mean by more code is just you're getting more productivity of the day more efficiency you're actually getting more done if you and me can write the same quality code but I can write two times the amount then that's better than writing less right so hopefully you get what I'm saying here hopefully this was a helpful video if you like these short tip videos leave a like subscribe to the channel and I will see you in another one foreign [Music]