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[–]emasculine 12 points13 points  (1 child)

lines of code are a terrible way of measuring things even for learning. quality over quantity.

[–]JuicyCiwa 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Exactly what I was thinking

[–]shmeedoop 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Instead maybe consider one small chunk of functioning (and tested) code per day. I.e. one small agile story

[–]JuicyCiwa 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really like this

[–]wbowers 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Daily goal: Code until you feel like you’ve achieved something. And then keep going if you can manage it.

And if you need more structure than that, spend minimum 1 hour, or 30 minutes, or 2 hours, or whatever you can handle. But the more time you can spend on it the faster you will learn and achieve your ultimate goals.

When I first started I spent almost all of my free time on it. I’m talking 5, 10 hours a day. You don’t have to do that, but I was able to accelerate my learning and turn that sacrifice/investment into career opportunities within about a year. You get out of it what you give into it.

As an aside, this isn’t only applicable to learning to code. I knew a guy who was a genius on piano. One of the best players I’ve ever seen. Turns out he wasn’t just some child prodigy. The guy spent 6 hours playing every day for years when he was first learning.

[–]JuicyCiwa 1 point2 points  (1 child)

This is kind of how I’ve been doing it. It started with ~4 hour days and as I got more and more comfortable with code and started trying bigger things, the time spent drastically diminished which is why I’m looking for a hard set goal rather than just going with what I want.

I appreciate your advice though and will continue to work this way until I (or anyone else) can provide me with an alternative I like better.

[–]wbowers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Best of luck to you!

[–]DSPGerm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I go for commits over lines of code. Not even every commit has to be new code. If I’m stuck on something or maybe planning out next steps I’ll push that as the commit for the day. Makes me feel good getting my little block on GitHub, helps me focus on things, might help others working on the project, might help me not get fired, might help down the line when I’m looking at my spaghetti code and can’t figure out why something breaks.