programming_life_tips.md

• Devote 90 minutes a day to "practice"

  • practice = working on something fun with a path

• Build to learn not to use/finish

• Seven Slotted Learning Todo List

  • Strict seven slots
  • When it's full and you want to add something remove something and place in a "someday" file in your digital notepad of choice

• Manage anxiety by converting to apathy or control

  • Flow model can be helpful for this:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Conditions_for_flow

• Apathy to get things done and avoid dread

• Use the most frictionless tools

  • Tessel
  • VIM/Emacs
  • Atom
  • ClojureScript
  • ES6+
  • Heroku
  • (Iterate on this, feel free to grow as you learn to use more complicated tools)

• Visualize the problem you need to solve before you solve it
  Think about steps required to solve it

  • ie: Othello Steps:
    • UI
    • Legal
    • Move Validation
    • game-loop
    • the AI

• TDD Can be your friend for visiualizing the problem before you start

• Master your tools

  • typing.io
  • VIM Adventures
  • Using REPLs
  • Using good type systems
  • Understanding good abstractions (see: lisp)

• Use good tools for mastering tools
  Editors and Reviewers exist for a reason. Only use online tutorials when on the bleeding edge

  • Books
  • Courses
  • Koans

• Write your own Koans and publish them for next level mastery

• Take breaks every three hours.
  You're not a machine contrary to capitalists beleifs
  Use the apple watch or app that beeps at you to take a walk if necessary

• Visualize bigger picture solutions

• Setup systems for self care
  (Seems obvious but needs to be said These take priority)

  • Running
  • Sleeping enough
  • Eating right
  • Meditating

• Recommend Build your own lisp

  • Well written, incredibly useful, and teaches layering abstractions.
  • Fun tidbit related to that:

  but instead of working with it directly, write a wrapper that can output Tex from your favorite programming language, and keep running

• After(?) that clojurescript

  • clojurescript koans every day for a week, just do it

• Internalize this advice:

  • A computer receives, stores, and manipulates information.
  • Programmers refer to information as 'data'.
  • Data can be structured to represent concrete things - a song, a picture, a street address, an entire telephone book.
  • Data can also represent abstract things, such as the relationships between you and all of your friends.
  • Computers can only store data that can be represented as a collection of numbers.
  • This is where all those Zeroes and Ones come from - they are how the computer stores numbers.
  • Programmers write code, which is itself a kind of data, to tell a computer how to manipulate data.
  • Programmers break data manipulations into small, understandable steps, and then compose the steps together.
  • Programmers create abstractions by finding patterns in code and giving those patterns or ideas a name (and often a theoretical background).
  • Programmers gain productivity by layering abstractions, at the cost of not understanding or controlling the entire system.

• Decision Making for Over Thinkers

  • Assess choices
  • List pros and cons quickly
  • remove yourself from the equation if reasonable
  • "what would be the best thing to do" NOT "what do I want to do most"
  • Be willing to iterate on a decision when new information arises
  • Context: you are usually not bound to your initial assessments as you gather more facts. so you commit to doing something, then you start doing it, but if it's not going to work you go back to decision making you go

• Utilize Todo lists

• Todo list mentality (incomplete?)

  • To stick to it keep it right in front of you at all times
  • Gut check "Is this the most important thing for me to be working on right now?" "Is this as critical as I thought it was when I put it on the list here"