Being a fast programmer and maintaining the quality of your code is equally important. Increasing the speed of your coding in the process of being more efficient and working towards a first time right approach. Let us see some ways of becoming a faster programmer. It applies to all employees and freelance web developers also.
Having Strong Fundamentals
You can’t ignore the fundamentals of language, which must be strong and constant learning of new features is required. Remember, it’s not just about a programming language fundamentals but more about programming fundamentals. For example, having good clarity about Object Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts, iterations, conditional loops, exceptions, error handling, RDBMS concepts, etc. These things are language independent and making your fundamentals crystal clear is important in first few years of your programming career. As 90% of the work is in web based and App based programming, having knowledge of such programming languages is an absolute necessity now.
Learning by Examples
We are assuming that you have already done good homework related to your language and syntax study. It is time you have to start learning from code examples. The more examples you see, more quickly you will learn the way of thinking and logically break a functionality into modules. If possible, execute the small snippets of code you find and look at the examples with no defects/bugs. Reading a good code is the first step.
Learn by Coding
While you are reading examples of good code, it is a continuous process, and you will always find better programmers than you. Simultaneously, you have to start writing your code. Practice makes a coder perfect! You need to write a lot of code to understand how much time it takes for you to code a functionality.
Creating a baseline is extremely important to understand the current status and improve from there. There is no need to wait for a client or employer to assign you a project. You can select your simple project and start working on it and develop the modules step-by-step. Hand coding (without the use of any code generation tools) is necessary to get into a faster lane quickly.
Getting Help
Don’t be shy about asking for help in person or online. No one is born perfect, and in computer programming, there is a lot to learn. Even if you learn new things for entire life, the programming world will still have a lot of stuff to offer. With that vast knowledge, you can’t learn everything and whenever you need expert help or guidance, do ask. Register with good forums related to your programming language, read the threads and ask for specific help. Ask your peers, seniors, and managers also. Everyone will not tell you the code but look for hints related to logic, analysis, any specific function to be used which you are unaware, etc.
Use of Online Resources
There are tons of online resources available, and you have to understand how to use them. The first and most important thing is fast searching. You have to bookmark the best technical resources where you can always fall back and look for help. As a lot of time of programmers goes in searching for some resources, methods, functions and code examples, having such sites marked always helps. There are PDF files, e-books, technical articles, how-to blogs and much more. Keep reading them in your spare time and at the same time keep adding good sites to your bookmarks.
Way of Thinking
The way, you have to spend a lot of time in searching, considerable time goes in the thinking process also. You will see programmers just staring at the screen and neither reading nor coding! It happens, when you can’t break the program into pieces and quickly get to the current code snippet. The way to work on this is again going back to examples. While reading, good coding examples, you have to understand the way the good programmers are thinking.
Understanding the analytical thinking process is more important than a piece of code. Experienced programmers will help you by changing your way of thinking and telling you a logical way to code a functionality. That makes all the difference in faster coding. If you are into freelance work, you know the value of your every single minute, and you should always try to improve your programming speed and accuracy.
Debugging Techniques
As a good and fast programmer, you have to keep going towards first time right approach as well as be an expert in debugging. It is an area where programmers waste lot of their time. If you write code for 4 hours and spend remaining 4 hours in debugging it and fixing issues, your productivity reduces to 50%. So, using the right tools and quick debugging is important. To help with it, always try to find bugs in someone else’s program. Maybe do a pair programming, where you work with another programmer and find defects in each other’s code. Let the coder fix those defects so that he/she remembers it and avoid them in further coding.
Using Right Tools
Use of right frameworks, code libraries, and taking help from other languages are all the ways to improve your programming speed. Selecting the right framework can be a good starting step and use of available function libraries is also to be understood. Writing a piece of code in another language or using different variants of your programming language as per need, are the advanced techniques. Once you master the basics, you can try these techniques to improve further.
Summary:
There are multiple things you need to do to become a faster programmer. First and most important is good understanding and study of your core programming language. Secondly, learning from examples of good code. Then comes another parameters like coding lot of programs, debugging, fixing issues and reading through freelancing tips and other places where you get good hints about specific techniques. Being a part of an active forum will keep you updated of the current happening in the programming world.