A little something I made
When I’m not writing about code, I design geeky mugs. If you’d like one for your desk, or know someone who would, take a look at my designs.
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To a certain extent, coding is something that you never completely forget. Although you may be a little slower after a break, once the problem-solving part of your brain fires up, you will still have the skills and knowledge to do the things you have always done.
However, coding is also a lot like the knowledge of a foreign language. For example, after a long break, a previously fluent French speaker can still tell you what the gist of a document written in French is, and they can still understand the speech that they hear. But when it comes to actually speaking the language, even a fluent speaker can stumble over the correct words after a long time away.
Why we forget how to code
Speaking French involves remembering the words for everything you want to express. Whereas reading or listening to French gives you clues in the form of reminders (words you had forgotten), context, and flow. It is the same with programming.
Reading code is easy – even after a long break, your brain can distinguish the patterns and the library calls because they are familiar, they are contextual, and they flow in a logical manner. But put a blank text editor in front of a programmer after a long lay-off and ask them to actually write a program that (for example) converts binary to decimal, and they may not find it as simple as they expected.
When there is no context, there are no reminders. If all you have is a blank page and your memory, unless it’s information that is regularly accessed in the brain, you won’t be able to recall the things that you already know. This is because memory is context-dependent, which means that accessing data without any prompts is harder than accessing data that is linked to something external.
The upshot of this is if you want to be a great programmer you have to keep on writing code. Not reading about code, not debugging code, not thinking about code. You need to sit down and write code. Often.
If you want a good reminder of why small, regular practice matters, The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey To Mastery is the ultimate resource on honing your programming skills to their highest level. And if you are devoid of inspiration and want some tasks to work on, then Exercises For Programmers contains 57 challenges to get you thinking about code outside of your day job.
The more you code, the faster and more knowledgeable you will become.
So what do you need to do this weekend if you aren’t already doing it at work?
Write code 🙂
