Great writers read…a lot
Friday, November 29th, 2019Dear Reader,
Have you ever watched one of those movies where a software developer (usually called a hacker) is sitting in front of 2 screens and on both of them code is scrolling by at a fast pace while the hacker nods knowingly like they are reading and understanding what they are seeing?
Yeah, that doesn’t happen.
A more common scenario is that a software developer will fork a repo, clone it locally, open their editor of choice and start reading through the code. Scrolling through it slowly. opening another edito for the same code and scrolling back up to a previous section and comparing the two. This goes on for a long time.
Reading other people’s code is probably the best way to learn how to program. If you know what the code does then reading the code shows you how someone else solved the problem.
Just like a great writer reads more than they write, a great software developer will read code, theirs and other peoples, more than they will write code. As a junior developer this goes double for you. Since you do not have a body of work to copy and paste from, you need to see how other people solved common problems so you can understand how to solve them yourself.
Until next time,
I <3 |<
