How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit
I see a lot of people do stupid shit because they don't seem to think it will make a big difference.  One mistake isn't a big deal, is it?  The problem is that it becomes habit, and then you're making plenty of these, and you think it's okay, but in reality a lot of these mistakes have become normal.<p>I think the most profound thing about the post was that it showed a striking difference between determined practice and directed practice.  Just being determined and putting in the hours will _not_ be sufficient to pass a plateau of learning.  Sometimes you need _directed_ learning to push you past that plateau.<p>Applying that to code, I think this is the difference between just programming a lot and thinking you'll get better, and actually reading texts, reading code and talking to other programmers to see how other people do things better.<p>For example, you can start using more anonymous functions in your code because all the cool kids are doing it, but unless you really understand how to deal with high-order functions and what a map and fold are, you are just going to be doing stupid shit that doesn't really help your code at all.