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Why Knowing Code Conventions Matters: Tips for Clean, Readable Code
Something you’ll realize when you start coding is that there are many ways that you can code the same thing. For example, when it comes to indentation, instead of using spaces, you can use tabs—or vice versa, instead of tabs, you can use spaces. When you write your for loop, your while loop, or your…
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Stop Watching Beginner Coding Tutorials and Do This Instead!
The best way to learn how to code is not by watching videos or tutorials, but it’s by actually coding something. I, and a lot of other people, call this project-based learning. It’s like learning how to cook—you don’t get better by reading recipes or watching cooking tutorials, but by actually cooking and then tasting…
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Pointers in C Explained: What They Are and Why You Need Them
When I first learned pointers in C, I thought they were very annoying. I would always run my program and then I would run into a segmentation fault error, and then I would have no idea why there was an error going on. It was just annoying to keep track of all the different pointers,…
Why Git and GitHub Are Important
Whenever I talk to beginner programmers and they tell me that they’ve never used Git, I suddenly have this urge to teach them how to use Git and just go over the basics with them. As a programmer with 10+ years of professional experience, I’ve used Git everyday to work with my coworkers and to…
How To Learn How To Code While Working Full Time
So how to learn how to code while working a full-time job, while working a 9 to 5? I’ve worked with a lot of people who have done this—who are working, and then they go home, and then they’re learning how to code in their spare time so that they could make a career shift.…
Is Coding for Me? How To Know for Sure…
You’re probably wondering if coding is for you or not. Maybe you’ve seen other people learning how to code, and when you look at them, they seem to understand the concepts really well and pick it up a lot faster than you. I see a lot of beginner programmers ask these kinds of questions, and…
How To Use a Debugger (In Depth Tutorial)
I remember when I was in university, my professor was teaching us how to use a debugger, and the debugger that he was showing us was GDB. GDB is a debugger that you can use with C. With this debugger, he was talking about breakpoints, pausing the program, and then continuing the program and looking…
How to Stand Out and Land Your First Software Job
So, it seems that the general sentiment these days is that it’s really hard to land a software job compared to years prior. Before, you could go to a bootcamp and quickly get a software job—maybe even within a year. But nowadays, people are graduating with CS or software degrees, and they can’t even get…
How To Handle File I/O in C: Read, Write, and Append
One of the coolest things you can do through programming is to read, write, and append information to files. Once you know how to do this, you can store data from your program to a file and receive that data at a later time when you restart the program. This is a foundational concept for…