Practising Programming
I don&#x27;t believe programming is anything like other skills(That&#x27;s why I love tech jobs!).  There&#x27;s no muscle memory strictly needed. No precise memorization.<p>There&#x27;s none of what I call &quot;atomic time regions&quot; where once you start, everything has to be right or the whole thing is considered a failure(Think of calligraphy and how one bad move can ruin a piece).<p>Instead there&#x27;s just a small amount of base knowledge every coder needs, plus vague familiarity with frameworks, and a general sense of what will possibly screw you over later(Anyone can write most programs that don&#x27;t involve novel math or algorithms, the challenge is in making them not screw you over somehow).<p>If a world champion level programmer makes a basic app in Vue, it will maybe be 20% better than mine, because... modern programming is all about providing obviously ways to do common things. There&#x27;s not much variation possibly in something so completely technical.<p>If we both design 100kloc apps, his(hers?) will be a lot better.  There design choices in that kind of thing that don&#x27;t come up at all in a 1 day project.<p>Sports people say you play how you practice, right?  So there&#x27;s only one kind of technical practice I care about.  The kind that is similar to production code. Either in scope and scale, or depth of crazy algorithmic math, or any other way, but if it doesn&#x27;t replicate production... is it really practice?<p>Guitar plays have a concept called &quot;Noodling&quot;, defined as playing guitar... but not really playing <i>something</i>.  It might sound OK, but you can kind of feel that it&#x27;s not really helping you towards being able to play that song you want to play, the way you actually want to play it.<p>It&#x27;s widely considered not really practice. Almost like scrolling Facebook compared to reading a book, like I should be doing instead of scrolling Hacker News....<p>I don&#x27;t make <i>any</i> effort to practice programming unless I want to learn a specific new technology.<p>I just do projects that I think are worth doing, and resemble the stuff I want to do in the future, and I try to do them well without hackery.