Good article - it's funny how easy it is to forget these points.<p>"Worrying about “geek cred” will slowly kill you"<p>This one rang particularly true as I easily overlook any successes I've had because they're rarely made public. The ones that make it to the light of day are never what I consider my best work. I'll see more popular programmers, lament my relative obscurity and then the whole Impostor Syndrome will flare up and nearly stop me in my tracks.<p>It's such a fantastic feeling to have leaned to say "meh, fuck it" and focus on what I love about my vocation.
This is my favourite statement, really hits home.<p>> I’ve found that a big difference between new coders and experienced coders is faith: faith that things are going wrong for a logical and discoverable reason, faith that problems are fixable, faith that there is a way to accomplish the goal. The path from “not working” to “working” might not be obvious, but with patience you can usually find it.
If I wrote an article with the same title I would only include one thing to remember when coding and that is to write code with the expectation that others will have to read your code. (This of course assumes you're not an ass who wants to make people's lives more difficult!)
I don't know, I kind of stopped reading when the author said that understanding pointers and recursion makes someone gifted in programming. Those are really just fundamentals.
Some really cool points on getting started. Coding is hard and "coders" (like me) take getting started for granted. Worse, for new coders, it can sometimes feel like you need to jump to the top of the mountain rather than taking it one step at a time.<p>In the past, I found the best methods of picking up coding or new languages is to work on a small multi day/week project, and preferably with a friend that's just as lost as you are. It's great cause you'll have a support system in place and having two brains thinking about the same problems, which helps tremendously when treading carefully - or spontaneously (up to you :)
good post, the points are feel-good/inspiring. Suprised this didn't get posted earlier (noticed it's a year old!) oh wait, it did 4 months ago but no one noticed ..hmph