Any ideas about daily good habits to become a hardcore programmer ?

* Wake up as early as possible
* Drinking caffeine (but not too much!) boosts your productivity immensely
* Always push your abilities and learn new things
* Don't leave your room for days straight

1. Program regularly
2. Think hard. Having the solution in mind (or on paper) is the precursor to coding
3. Don't back down when challenges arise
4. Feel free to rubber duck or work with colleagues or developers online. Thinking and coding alone can sometimes bring you fatigue and reduce your efficiency
5. Read books on coding philosophies, conventions, common mistakes/solutions and PRACTICE them in your day to day coding
6. Teach others even if they think you are paranoid. And learn from others even if they are juniors. Learning never stops

Not becoming a hardcore. Get a life

I@iiii actually I don't see why both can't be possible. I think we can be a very good programmer and have a life at the same time. So your comment is pointless.

@asgs thanks the 6th point is really a plus I didn't think about it.

@trabdlkarim hardcore means something becomes your life. And it shouldn't.

Hardcore?
That basically means you want to burn out. Bad idea.

@Root not necessarily just to be among the best ones!

@trabdlkarim a good programmer != hardcore programmer

@trabdlkarim Don't let your ego get in the way of your skills. The best programmers are humble and kind to others and help them when they need help.

A good programmer knows what tools are the best for each job which is only something that can come from experience of actually coding. Unless you think the best programmers just hack their way through problems and leave the shit code to the rest of us to figure out and clean it up....if not just nuke it and start over again so it's maintainable.

Easiest summary: have fun.

Do any project that sounds fun to make, and build them in interesting ways. Try new approaches. Build fun and useless features. Make games! Make clones of classic games like Tetris and Asteroids. Build little useful utilities like a name generator, output colorizer, logger, or file organizer.

You learn the most when you’re enjoying yourself.

Try coding for one

@Nanos @Root @iiii <----- these guys know what's up.

There are only nightly habits for that, not daily.

@electrineer Bad pun. Time to die.

Learn C.

Program a 6 pin microcontroller with assembler. Build the programmer from electronics parts. Find an old pc with a parallel port for talking to the programmer. Do everything in DOS.

One thing that really helped me a lot is watching other people code. So many tricks you pick up that way:
keyboard shortcuts, terminal commands, utility software etc.
Tons of features in my editor which I had heard of but never used became brought to my attention as I kept seeing how they sped up other ppls workflow.

@jiraTicket Your username provokes this visceral gut-wrenching reaction on my stomach. Jeezus

@3rdWorldPoison Mine too, if I’m being honest.

@3rdWorldPoison Thanks! That was my intention 😀

Another tip:

A valuable habit is to allow yourself to do a little bit of deep diving every week.
Mix "getting shit done" with "looking shit up".

Many people argue you should bake a few hours of learning into your calendar. That doesn't work for me. If I'm working on a task that's almost done and I get a calendar notification saying "it's time for doing something else" I will ignore it.

I make sure to bake learning into my workflow. When I'm working on a piece of code - if there's something I don't fully understand - I'll allow myself to take to look it up.

That means that I get a bit of "education" each day.

As opposed to focusing on going 100% in "getting shit done" mode and then getting annoyed cause I have to stop doing what I'm doing to go to a conference or take a class.

@rooter Not at all.

@rooter Learning C teaches you how a computer works, knowledge that can be applied in a vary large majority of scenarios.

@rooter Probably not wise until later.

Unless you want to learn through some coding game, such as where you write code to control little robots or something. But serious projects with assembly? That is madness unless you know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and exactly why C doesn’t work well for your particular case.

@rooter If as an exercise or for fun, absolutely go for it. osdev.org

However the assembly bits are actually quite minimal in an OS. But assembly is still fun!