Many people want to be a programmer, but often find themselves flailing around in the dark. These are the things I’ve done to help aid myself in coding more, learning new things, and just becoming a better programmer.

Use GitHub DAILY!

Ok, maybe you don’t have to use GitHub specifically but choose a platform or host your own git and use it as much as you can. Finish a feature or part of a project… COMMIT IT! This makes it very easy when you leave and come back to the project.

Collaborators can find your project and contribute or even fix errors you have made, which helps you improve quickly.

Track Your Progress

I’m constantly bouncing around and when I started I was getting discouraged. I’d start a project, move on or get busy, and not look at it again or even code for weeks!

To fix this, I ended up using a free tool called wakatime. This showed me what projects I was spending time on, editors I used, languages, and spit it all out on a dashboard.

Check out my GitHub page @ https://github.com/christitustech for all my stats and share yours down below in the comments! I am extremely competitive and I code more knowing I have people watching my progress.

Note: As a bonus, check out my hidden profile readme @ https://github.com/christitustech/christitustech and steal my auto generated setup!

Setup Your Ideal Workflow

You have to like your work or at least enjoy parts of it. I follow this phrase and make sure I find something I do daily that I enjoy.

“Focus on the Journey, not the destination. Joy is not found in finishing an activity, but doing it!” - Greg Anderson

It’s not to say that you will enjoy everything, because on the flip side of that phrase I made my own.

“You have to shovel a little shit in every job” - Chris Titus

The point being is there will be things you will hate, but just make sure it’s not all bad. For example, I love VIM as it makes me just feel cool even though sometimes I am slower than if I just used VSCODE with the proper extension. The reason I do this is because of two reasons:

1. Eventually I will optimize VIM enough that I’m faster than VSCODE
2. I just feel awesome typing and coding in VIM

This isn’t a advertisement for you to use VIM! In fact, I’d recommend you NOT use VIM unless these things interest you and you want to go down that rabbit hole. It depends on you!

Focus on what works for you and what you enjoy as far as an environment. This is more about how you FEEL than practical application. The better you feel in your workflow, the better your work product!

Set Goals

If you are going to improve in anything you need to have a goal. For me it is all about putting in the time consistently. That is true with everything in life that you go to learn. MORE TIME = BETTER RESULTS

Example Goals:

• 3 hours of coding per day
• 500 Git Contributions in 2022

Once you set these goals look at how you are doing. I recommend both short term and long term goals like I listed above.

Now, go code!