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.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.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.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.