Tips to improve programming skills

Key Takeaways

do you want to remain an average programmer for your whole life or do you have a dream of becoming a credit of programming I'm going to share some useful tips today that can help improve your programming skills tip number one is data structures and algorithm a programmer cannot become a better programmer unless you have a sound knowledge of data structures and algorithm doesn't matter what programming language you are using data structures and algorithms are everywhere so if we have a good knowledge of these concepts you can write better code just to give you example here I have a code snippet which is trying to extract unique country names from customer records now you can solve this problem using a list but a better way of doing this will be using a set data structure because set by default guarantees uniqueness of elements and you don't have to remove the duplicates explicitly after you construct a list so this code that uses said is overall a better code I have a list of our data structure tutorials which I am going to provide a link in the video description so you can refer to that and the important thing in those tutorials is the exercises at the end of every tutorial I provide and exercise along with the solutions so you can practice those exercises and make your data structure skills better second tip is coding best practices there are best practices out there which can help you write better code overall just to give you example here is a code snippet which care checks whether the device is high-end or not now while you can write this code in this four lines and it is functionally perfectly okay you can write same code in a compact way using one line as shown here so you want to write a compact code efficient code the code that uses less CPU and less memory I have created a github page with a list of coding guidelines so you can refer to that page and this is something you can use during even code reviews next one is code reviews you should get your code reviewed by others who are better or who are seniors let's say if you are in college you can ask your seniors or your teachers to do code review if you're in working in a company then you you can ask again your senior programmers or the people who are experts in particular area to get your code reviewed when other people review your code they will give you guidelines on how you can make your code better because when we're coding or we all this thing that we are doing the best job but when other pair of eyes look at it you get a different perspective on the situation and it can again give you very useful tips on how you can improve a particular area of your code the next one is contributing to open source when you contribute to open source and when you create a pull request let's say I have shown here some sample pandas pull request so pandas is a Python library and they have a list of open bugs even you can help in documentation you know you don't have to think okay I'm not good and I'm not that great in programming and I won't be able to contribute to open source don't underestimate yourself you can even contribute in documentation and when you fix the small bugs you get an opportunity to interact with experts because the people who are reviewing your pull requests are experts and the best brains in the coding world so you will get their thoughts on your code and that can be tremendously useful so try to look at the open source project try to look at the issues which are open and try to see if you can help and you can definitely help again you don't have to be an expert next one is practicing interview questions or doing competitive programming there are many portals out there which can help you practice these interview questions or competitive programs and the reason why we want to do this is when you are working on a software project the big project is a collection of small small programs so if you have expertise in writing small code snippets in a better efficient way your overall software project is going to be very good efficient the first platform that I have here is a hacker rank so in hacker rank you can create a login and you can practice the sample questions so they have so many questions and challenges you can participate on all that you can look at the submissions by other programmers and just keep on practicing you know like if even if you are working or even if you're in college just have an aim of practicing let's say at least one question you can practice at least one competitive program every single day and in a year you would have practised more than 300 programs and at the end of the year you'll be a very very better programmer the other platform is career capcom now on this platform the people who go for interviews in big companies such as Amazon and Google they come back from the interview and they post these questions on career cup and then other people will try to answer it so you can filter the questions using company name using number of answers which are given and you can browse through these questions and practice them yourself and then verify your answers with other people's answer so that will provide you a big opportunity of practicing these questions the third platform is gigs for gigs so here again they have questions on different data structures different difficulty levels and so on so competitive programming very very important next one is using Google and steak overflow to find the best code snippets for a given problem for example you want to filter out lists of objects in your Python list now you can write a simple for loop and it will work again the idea is not to make any crappy code which make things work but you want to come up with the best code that can make things work in an efficient way so here if you are searching for a list of Python objects the better way could be using a list comprehension so if you just do quick google you will find this stack overflow answer which will that using list comprehension is probably the optimal way of solving problem so once you write some code I try to do Google and find a code snippet on Stack Overflow or any other platform just to confirm whatever code you're writing is the best way to solve a given problem the next one is debugging skills yes I keep on saying this in-house mentioned this in my previous videos as debugging skills is something like let's say you are a doctor you're a surgeon okay and there is a there is a problem so now you do a surgery you investigate you do all your Diagnostics you know you do city scan and x-rays whatever and those are the tools you have to look into problem little deeper same way debugging is a tool for any programmer whenever your code is not behaving the way you expect it to behave debugging allows you to go deeper inside and kind of almost investigate as if you are an FBI agent right so improving debugging skills can go a long way I have a playlist for debugging skills so go watch it I have seen many programmers who do not know even conditional breakpoints you know and if let's say you have a for loop which is a iterating thousand times and in the six hundred twenty second iteration let's say you are getting your bug reproduce you're not going to do F then F temp 600 times right you want to use conditional breakpoint in that case so having knowledge of different tools and different skills and debugging area is very important so I have this playlist I'm going to refer to another video which shows you how you can debug things in a Chrome browser again all these useful links are going to be in video description so check that out last but not the least project Raj X projects you should work on as many projects as possible and if possible work on diverse set of problems for example if you're a website developer you can develop a static website first then build website build ecommerce website for agape portfolio type of website so when you work on diverse set of projects you touch different areas in programming different dimensions and that again helps improve your programming skills if you are in a data science war let's say you can work on a project which just the simple data visualization then you can work on a project which uses classification or regression then work on a project which uses deep learning NLP this way you are touching different areas and it just gives you a different perspective overall on how to solve real-world problems alright so projects are very important that's all I had for this video if you know of any tip which I have not covered please post in a video comment below so that other people can benefit also out of seven or eight tips that I covered in this video tell me which tip is your favorite based on your experience something you used in past and it has proven to be very very useful to you so please mention that in the video comment below and thank you very much for watching