Why I'm a Better Developer than You

so I asked myself if there was anything that I thought I did they gave me a competitive advantage over other programmers and there was immediately three things that jumped to my mind that I feel like because I do them I have an advantage and they've been super helpful that I do them so I figured I would share them with you guys because they're all things that are easy to pick up and that you could start doing today so we're gonna go through them let's start with number one and that is them so them is what I use to do all my coding so them is a text editor but also is a bunch of key bindings that you can add to IDE s so for example I use vs code as my main editor and so I have the vehm extension in here so what them is is it's a bunch of short keys you can think of and what it allows me to do is I can just basically type code faster and move code around faster right so if I want to move this import down I can and you can just see I can undo it very quickly and this all happens from your keyboard so the idea is you've never leave your keyboard so I am typing but I can also go in and manipulate code all for my keyboard and so I don't have to go over to my mouse scroll around like let's say I want to go to the top of the page or the bottom of the page so here what I would do is I go to my mouse I'd scroll to the very bottom and now I'm here right and again there may be a hotkey for that and there is in vim but so like for example I brushed G twice to go to the top capital G to go to the bottom I use shift and then what is this bracket I guess to move chunks of code it's very helpful this is me just moving chunks of code at a time see how my cursor is moving around that's pretty nice this one I like to use a lot where I I will change the word into a letter so let's say I want to change the word update so I want to say maybe change instead of update I can change into the O like that and I freaking love undoing in vim just undo that real quick macros are a blast I just really have a great time coding them like I really enjoy the experience as well and you're also just able to manipulate code at a much faster rate if you take a programmer who is coding in vim versus someone who's not coding in them you're gonna notice a significant difference in just the way they're able to handle the code I also think this counts if you use Emacs or something like that I'm not really religious about them I think any kind of key bindings knowing them well and coding is gonna pay off huge in the long run again I know it does take like a little bit to get up to speed but it pays off huge like I don't even consider myself like an advanced user I would say like I'm intermediate at most and I get a ton of gain from it and there's people that do way cooler stuff than I do but that's that's been for you I highly recommend learning it to learn it what I did is I use vim tutor so go Google how you can install that on your computer basically it's gonna walk you through the beginning stuff of them and then after that I just recommend going cold turkey like everything you code after that you should be using BIM I think it's fine to use the vim plugin and BS code some people are a little elitist about that and recommend just using like vim itself that's probably good to start off with is probably the VIP matter probably to get that experience but I don't think it's that big of a deal if you want to learn and BS code because some of the vs code features are super nice and that's really what I do now is I mix for him and that but yeah that's of him that's tip number one I feel like because I'm using them I'm able to just like do stuff with code way faster all right so tip number two or thing number two is I really know data structures and algorithms pretty well and so the reason why I do is in school my class was actually pretty bad and so the algorithms class I learned probably nothing in so what I decided to do is just take an online course at core SIA or Coursera as I was taking the class I also ended up doing an MIT course as well and so basically when I was in college for computer science I took some courses and MIT courses on data structures and algorithms and that supplemented things very well to what I was learning in college and I think if you don't know this it's going to hurt you and so especially when I see people that are coming from boot camps and maybe they dip into data structures just a little bit or not at all I think they are at a major disadvantage and the other thing that I did for a little bit was competitive programming like I would jam on sphere online judge for a while and what this is if you've never heard of competitive programming is you're basically given a problem like this or you're basically given example input and they're like they ask you some question and then you have to write a code some code to solve that problem and what you do is you just paste your code in there there you go and then there's competitions for this where they give you like six problems you get to solve in like an hour or three hours depending on the event and then the first people to finish all the coding problems win so for just like a tiny bit of time I did that and so they're basically all data structure and algorithm problems I don't think you really have to go to this extreme this is one of the reasons why I actually stopped doing this kind of once I got into it was because I felt like it was kind of useless after a little bit because you start learning some really obscure algorithms you never use and it kind of gets straight useless so I don't think you need to go super super deep into data structures as soon as you start getting into things where you're just learning obscure ones that you know you're like what am I ever going to use this that's when I stopped eating doing data structures but I think at least having a good fundamental and noting knowing all the ones you have available to you is very powerful and knowing like Big O notation and runtimes of these things is huge and I think it really comes down to when you come across a hard problem someone who has a fundamentals and data structures has some ideas has like a toolkit of some things they may be able to try out for this particular problem and so I highly recommend if you took a bootcamp or you didn't take a very good algorithms class in college you didn't go to college take like a course here Cote course there's a ton of them now that you can take I think I did the Princeton one but I can't remember which one but there's a ton of colleges that are give them out for free now so take one of these and it's gonna help you out a ton the last thing is kind of a joke but it's kind of not at the same time and it is sleeping so this is something that I at least get nine hours a day and I feel like because of that I have a huge advantage you especially in college but even in the work workplace I see it all the time is just zombies all around you and you were just not thinking clearly if you're not sleeping an adequate amount each night and so compared to like just the clarity of thinking that you get from sleeping like I shouldn't even have to say this right but honestly I see people every day I talked to them every day and they're just song bees and so they're just not gonna be at the same level and so that is like the biggest thing like ask yourself right now how are you feeling are you tired I'm actually a little tired but yeah I mean I like this is also comes down to like you there's really a diminishing return in programming as well like if you're spending a long time programming you're gonna hit like this point where you're like crap like your brain starts introducing bugs into your code faster than you're actually improving the code itself that also goes into how long you're actually just coding a single point of time but also if you're not sleeping a good amount you're basically a zombie the next day and you're just going to be introducing bugs into your code and I think the biggest thing this also goes back to data structures as well I think like if you have a good foundation in this and you're sleepy enough you're able to see into the future and like predict some of the cases and some of the things that may happen with your code and I feel like you can forget about and if you're not sleeping enough it's just like you know you're not you're not in that that zone during that flow zone thinking in the future how it's gonna affect your code I think it can you know go past you and you can miss a lot of corner cases and introduce things that are going to cause problems later so I feel like you can solve a lot of problems up front and you have less bugs up front that way but there you go those are the three things that stood out in my mind I was like yeah these are all things that anyone could be doing and if you like the programmers that are doing these things have a huge advantage

Channel: Ben Awad

Views: 253,595

Keywords: Developer, Better Developer, Why I'm a Better Developer, Why I'm a Better Developer than You

Id: 4WTV6ZCY4qo

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2019