Effortless improvement in the art of programming

Programming is art and you become a better artist by practising.

You have to take all that you have learnt, all that training, hard work and experience, and make them second nature, make them effortless.

Being in this more effortless state is what makes experienced programmers more effective; the state where you can focus on the problem in hand rather than remembering how to use the tools to solve it.

Train so that you no longer directly think about the drudgery of what you’re doing and can focus on the joy of expressing yourself.

Achieving this effortless state is not easy, but you can get there faster. The idea is to simply practise, nothing more, nothing less; but there are smart way to practise, effortless ways — or at least I find them to be.

Be smart though, practise often but not to the point of exhaustion. Instead give your brain rest and reset periods, including, but not limited to sleep cycles, to process what you’ve learnt.

The incredibly simple solution is to practise those concepts and let your brain grow around them, until they become a fundamental part of you, second nature.

The most talented/successful artists I known, make art all the time, constantly practising their craft. Good rock-climbers similarly practise, mentally (visualising routes) and physically, to reduce energy expended whilst climbing. Just look at what Alex Honold achieved recently in Free Solo – an amazing achievement born of practise.

The core idea here is that to learn something well, to make it effortless and second nature, you need to practise. The suggestion is becoming an effortless programmer requires constant practising of the art of software engineering. The idea here is that you can mix practising these concepts into your day-to-day programming, effortlessly, without using a huge amount of energy.

The basic idea to, whilst developing, hold a basic precept of the art of programming in your mind. Do this until that precept becomes second nature, effortless.

If you don’t meditate, it doesn’t matter, the concept here doesn’t require a meditative state, just keeping some precept of the art of programming in your mind whilst you dev — at the back of your mind, but not distracting you from your task in hand.

Precepts that you might choose start from basic things like language primitives, or higher level concerns such as patterns or algorithms, perhaps concepts like encapsulation, mutability (inc. const-correctness), risk, and the like, even process. Personally I frame these as questions:

Holding these precepts until you feel you appreciate them better, until the neural connections representing those precepts are reinforced and perhaps new connections are made. Each time you better understand these concepts the closer you get to becoming an effortless programmer.

The fundamental idea here is to, eventually, remove effort from the coding task, to make the constant task of improving as a developer less intrusive whilst increasing the effectiveness, so it shouldn’t slow you down doing you day job.

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