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Discussion on: What are the tips or techniques you wish someone had told you ages ago?

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Ted Hagos • • Edited
  1. schedule a time for coding - a long time ago, I thought I could code whenever time allows (like found time or small downtimes), it doesn't work for me. What work is if I set aside time, and simply allow myself to think about the coding work and eventually doing it
  2. buying a good set of over-ear headphones - filtering the outside noise helps a lot
  3. looping "rain sounds" or whatever white noise - works even better on a noise-cancelling headphones
  4. realizing that there isn't a "one editor to rule them all". I thought I could use Vim for all coding/editing/writing tasks; as it turns out I can, but not very well on all tasks. On editing config files and writing asciidoc, it went swimmingly, but when building a sizable Android or Java project, I'm better off with an IDE
  5. that when you drink lots of caffeine in a day, you should drink more water - more caffeine means more pee; and when you lose water it does wonky things to your brain, that'll cramp your coding. Drink lots of water
  6. running or walking (or any form of exercise) - not only does this shrink the belt size, as it turns out, it improves your brain too. You improve your brain, you improve your coding. brainrules.net/the-rules
  7. Read books written by really good devs - I see that a couple of people here endorse "Pragmatic programmer ..". Agree 100%. I love that book