Four months of self teaching and I still look up how to write a for loop over a dictionary, or the exact argument order for a slice. It feels like I am not learning, just getting faster at searching. Does this stop at some point, and if it does not, at what point does it stop being a problem?
Small thing that helped me: keep a personal snippets file. Mine is one text file with about forty entries and I add to it whenever I look something up for the third time. Searching my own file is faster than searching the internet and the act of writing the entry made about half of them stick anyway.
Starting one tonight. The third time rule is a nice trigger, otherwise I would try to write down everything.
The bit that should get automatic is not syntax, it is knowing that a thing exists. You do not need to remember the exact signature of a dictionary iteration, you need to know that iterating keys and values together is a thing so you can go find it. Recognition beats recall for almost everything in this job.
One practical accelerator: learn your editor's autocomplete and inline documentation properly. Hovering a function to see its arguments is a two second answer instead of a two minute detour through a browser tab, and the interruption cost is most of the pain you are describing.
Also worth learning the language's own docs site rather than whatever search returns. Once you know where the reference lives, lookups get boring, which is the goal.
Four months is early. The syntax that sticks is the syntax you have typed a hundred times, and there is no shortcut, only repetitions. If you want it faster, build things that reuse the same constructs deliberately rather than jumping languages.
@threat_modeler_j · last wk. · 3 replies
It never fully stops and that is not the useful thing to measure. Ten years in I still look up date formatting strings and argument order for the less common standard library calls, every single time.
What does change is the shape of the searches. At four months you search for syntax. Later you search for behaviour, things like what happens to this when the connection drops halfway. The day you notice your searches have stopped being how do I write X and become which of these two approaches breaks first, that is the progress marker.
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@lubed_linears · 7d ago
That reframing helps more than a study plan would have. My searches are still very much how do I write X.
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@eleven_tabs · 7d ago
Both kinds coexist forever anyway. I looked up the difference between two array methods this morning and I get paid for this.
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