If you’ve ever wanted to learn to speak a new language you may have done exactly what many people do and started out by Googling ‘what is the best way to learn a new language?’ Inevitably you get many conflicting opinions, this is the internet after all. One concept you are liable to come across is “immersion”. The idea being that you spend a considerable amount of your time immersing yourself in the language that you want to learn, listing to podcasts, watching TV shows, and ideally going to live in the actual country.
So you might be wondering what this has to do with coding? Well, I am not suggesting that you go and listen to people reading code all day, in order to immerse yourself in a coding language and somehow learn it that way. Coding doesn’t work like that. I did realize however that since making a conscious decision to level up my coding skills, I was immersing myself in coding. Namely listening to interviews, podcasts, and watching YouTube videos about programming in my down time, or on my commute to work. These videos weren’t tutorials on how to build projects, or anything like that, it was just people talking about being programmers.
I discovered that just by doing this I was becoming a better developer. I certainly wouldn’t understand everything that I heard, sometimes it would be interviews where people are talking about how they did some obscure thing on a server with a low level programming language that I had no idea about. However I did start to pick up on some things through repeated exposure. Somehow these concepts and practices improved my mindset and gave a real boost to my productivity. I realized that essentially what I was doing was immersing myself in the world of programming, much like people recommend when learning a language.
The main thing I have gained from doing this is a desire to better myself, and to improve. Instead of wanting to remain in the world of writing HTML and CSS or even React, I developed a desire to explore unfamiliar territory. I have stepped outside my comfort zone and begun to work on a text based RPG in Python, I have begun to study Computer Science topics, such as data structures and algorithms. Listening to people talk about doing incomprehensible things with low level languages made me realize that being a next-level developer isn’t out of reach for anybody, you just have to work hard towards it.
I would strongly recommend that anyone wishing to improve their development skills start to find podcasts where people talk passionately about programming and just immerse yourself in it. Have it on in the background whilst you work on your project or drive to work. Don’t worry about understanding everything. Just focus on adopting the mindset that you learn and you will be amazed and how much things will start to improve.