

Ask HN: Coder version of 1000 words a day - nekopa

Hi all,<p>I am trying to revive my coding skills after a hiatus of almost 20 years. A good piece of advice for writers is that they should write a 1000 words a day. How could I translate this into something for coding? I know the best way to get my skills back is to write code, but what kind of goal should I set myself for this? The reason the 1000 words per day worms for writers is that it gets them writing, doesn't matter what, or what quality, or how they feel, but they must just to put pen to paper. I am trying to figure out how I can make this work for coding.
Lines of code per day? Characters per day? Something else? Any ideas would be very appreciated.
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timestretch
I'd recommend reading a programming book on a topic that interests you. You'll
write better code after reading it, and may be inspired too. Any simple metric
such as character count or lines of code are useless. It is much more
important to find something interesting to work on, then commit to learning
everything necessary to complete it.

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Benferhat
Yes, good point, __training __is something that you _can_ measure
quantitatively. Count the number of pages you've read, code golf [1] puzzles
you've solved, etc. Good idea.

[1] <http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/>

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nekopa
I've been seeing a lot about code golf recently, sounds interesting.

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Benferhat
They're fun, easily quantifiable, and a good way to get yourself back into the
coding mindset. StackExchange has a big group, I believe Reddit might as well.

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Benferhat
I'd say you should go based on hours or TODO entries per day.

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nekopa
Thanks for the input. I like this idea, but it's hard to measure output. For
example, if I put aside an hour a day, some of the time I will be thinking
about code, maybe design, but what would be a good measure of how much code I
write? LOC, characters, functions... And would it vary depending on language?

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Benferhat
Writers can just sit down and write whatever pops into their heads.
Programming doesn't work that way. You have to think things through, look at
them from different altitudes, all the way from a bird's eye view of the
entire project, down to what's going on in this particular function. You might
also have to spend a ton of time debugging. These things are too nebulous to
measure quantitatively, so you have to measure them qualitatively.

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nekopa
I don't think it should be any different for _coding_. I probably wasn't too
clear in my question. I spend a lot of time designing and putting together
systems, but I just don't write code any more. As in actually opening up an
editor and just plain writing code. Like a writer, shouldn't I be able to code
whatever pops into my head too? For example, sit down and write a small
program that will maybe take a bunch of employee schedules (in xml) and find
openings and or conflicts in the schedules.

~~~
Benferhat
It just doesn't work that way.. I've spent entire days trying to get a feature
to work perfectly, often winding up with fewer lines of code than I started
with. Were I to judge such progress by lines of code, an achievement would be
transformed into a failure.

That's why I suggest going by TODO-list entries. Those are concrete things
that you know need to get done. You can even score them in terms of
anticipated difficulty, then try to reach a certain number of points per
day/week.

Think of yourself more as an editor than an author. An editor might spend a
lot of time re-factoring, looking up syntax, trying to make things flow
better, asking people for advice, etc. Amassing words and lines isn't your
goal.

