1 Tips to Help You Improve Your Programming Skills Quickly

How do you improve your programming skills? If you’re not sure where to start, then take heart; here is only one tips to help you improve your programming skills and make you more effective at software development. By the end of this article, you’ll know the right tools to use, what information to search for, and how to practice so that you can put your newfound skills into action quickly and easily.

I hope while reading this post you have selected a programming language in which you’re interested. It can be, Python, C++, angular, asp.net, Java, or anything. But the concept remains the same to improve your coding skill.

Start Solving Problems

Before starting programming you should always ask a question to yourself, the question is: how can I increase my programming skills, how can I go from beginner to intermediate or expert stage?

So you went through the if statements, the while loops, the for loops, the operators, the functions, the object-oriented programming whatever the basics are you have covered them.

Now, what do I do next? The answer is straightforward and everybody pretty much knows it already, that is projects. You should start with creating projects that you get excited about. One example would be:

In my OpenCV tutorials, In which I have half of the tutorial is based on the basics of OpenCV and the other half is just for projects to learn OpenCV from beginning to end.

Basic OpenCV Tutorial List

• Most useful OpenCV functions to know for image analytics
• Draw geometric shapes on images using OpenCV
• Warp perspective and Transform OpenCV python

OpenCV Projects

• Capturing mouse click events with Python and OpenCV
• Find and Draw Contours with OpenCV in Python
• Shape detection using OpenCV and Python
• Real-time Face Detection using Python and OpenCV

This is important because you have to dive in right away to the projects so you don’t really get tired of the coding.

So I have covered the basics and I am doing the projects what’s next? How do I get better at programming now?

The idea is that whenever you are creating projects the projects are basically derivatives of other projects so there is literally no project that is entirely new. What you are doing is you are replicating projects and you are taking pieces of different projects and putting them together. So now there are two ways to get better at developing these projects:

1. One is how you increase the coding speed
2. Second is how do you actually write better code or more efficient code

Increase coding Speed

So the answer to both of the above questions is generic functions and this is the tips that I was referring to improve your programming skills. We all know about functions. Functions are basically snippets of code that perform a specific task.

Example Project 1

Let’s take an example of a fish game where I have to spawn a lot of fish.

So what I will do is I will create a function that will create these fishes and it will randomly generate some fishes. I can create this function very quickly all I have to do is I will give input to the fish object and I will tell for example I need 100 fish or I need 20 fish or I need 30 fish and the fish function will generate those numbers of fish for me. That’s it.

So now what I need to do is if I have done this part which is basically spawning objects I should be able to use this part of the code or the function and replicate that in another project.

Example Project 2

Now let’s say I’m creating a city in which I have lots of cars, now I want to generate a random city or random locations of cars every time so I can use that same fish function in my car project and instead of the fish I will give input to the fish object as the car. So I will say that, okay now I want the car to be spawned in different locations within our city. The same function will deliver proper output.

So this way not only you will be able to reduce coding time but you will also increase your efficiency.

So that is the basic concept so this can tell you this can give you an idea of how to speed up your process of creating different projects which reduces your coding time.

Improve coding Standard

So you understand how you can speed up your coding. Now let’s understand how to increase efficiency to improve your coding standards. You can follow bellow two approaches to improve your coding standard:

• Try to write generic code
• Keep updating your code
• Save your code in a proper way

Write Generic Code

You should always try to write modular functions (or generic functions). You should always try to name your variables in a generic way.

For example, if you are creating that fish game you should not name the object as fish_object. You can just name it spawn_object or something generic like this. In that way even if you are using it in another project it should not be meaning something very specific. It should be something generic so that it is easy to read even in another project.

Keep Updating

You should always try to update your code with newly learned better techniques.

Let’s say you have written a function and later on you will learn new techniques, for example, you have learned for loops and now when you are learning better techniques you might come across list comprehensions now list comprehensions are like for loops but in one line they are a little easier to read.

Save your Code in Cloud

Now another technique you can follow which I am doing every day. You should store codes of any project you are working on, in the cloud. For example google drive, GitHub, etc. That way you will never lose your code and you can use those codes anywhere at any point in time.

Conclusion

So to improve your coding skill my concluded tips to improve your programming skills would be:

• Start working on projects from basic to advanced
• Always try to write generic functions to re-use those in different project
• Slowly increase your coding standards

That is for today, I hope you learned something new today. If you have any questions or suggestions about this tutorial, please let me know in the comment section below.