A programmer strives to be lazy (and you should, too)

As an employee you should try to do the most amount of work possible; as an individual you should try to do that with the least amount of effort; and as a colleague you should aim to make everyone else’s job easier. Sound like too much? Doing it all perfectly probably is too much, but just knowing what you’re aiming for should help you a great deal.

We have devoted a whole section to explaining what your mindset should be when coding, and it might seem like a waste of time better spent teaching some actual information… But that’s just not true. The goal in this part is not to give you more information but to help you make better decision when coding. By knowing what things you should and shouldn’t spend time on as well as what is and isn’t possible in coding, you should be able to more efficiently work and seek new knowledge when needed without feeding you unnecessary information.

Ideally, when you’re coding you should feel that thinking is free, effortless and fun, while actually writing code should be a chore, specially if you haven’t thought about it before. We will dive deeper into this in the next section. As we have said at the beginning, you should aim to do the least amount of effort to get the most amount of work while making everyone’s work easier. Here is where thinking really pays off. There are also a few tricks and rules-of-thumb that you should keep in mind when coding to avoid devoting more time into tasks that could be done easier and faster.

I hope I have lured you enough with the preamble, so let’s dive right into it by taking a look at what your mindset should be and how to optimise your time when coding, even if you have no experience.

• The coding mindset
  • Don’t try to be a computer, play to your strengths
  • Your strengths, spend time doing this
  • Time learning vs time doing, what to do when
• Lazy code vs sloppy code