How to study programming

Programming: How to Study

If you want to become good at programming, what's the best way to do it? Will your skills improve naturally just by accumulating work experience? Or should you just read books? Or should you just continuously copy and paste the code from those books? This lecture is for those who are wondering what and how to study.

Discover what advice "Expertise Research," a branch of cognitive psychology, can offer, and discover scientifically researched ways to become an expert faster and more effectively.

Do you feel like you should give up on development?

When do people often consider giving up on development? Of course, there are many reasons, but I'd like to focus on the one related to concerns about one's own abilities.

Here are some typical examples I've come across while coaching hundreds of people:

1. When you first start studying and it feels too difficult, and you can't understand anything no matter how much you read. When it feels like a complete fortress.

2. Even though I went to a famous academy, I felt like I was only improving my skills and my inner strength was stagnant.

3. When you've done everything everyone tells you to do, but your practical skills aren't improving. "I thought studying algorithms would make me a better developer, so I did. I learned frameworks because they told me to. I studied OOP, design patterns, and refactoring, and I studied cloud technology really diligently. But why isn't my practical skills improving?"

4. I thought that my career would improve as I gained more experience, but when I feel like I am just “getting used to it” and standing still or going backwards, even though I have enough experience.

5. I looked for a good company, thinking that if I went to a good company, I would learn a lot and improve my skills, but even after working at that company, I felt like it was just a waste of time.

There are times when everyone tries their best but nothing works. Then, this person becomes frustrated and thinks, "Maybe it's not me." They can no longer blame external factors, thinking, "That's because I don't know OO. If I just knew that, I'd be fine." Therefore, the blame shifts to their own inner self. Self-efficacy completely disappears.

What really broke my heart when I saw this was how these people had struggled through life in such a terrible, terrible way. I felt like if they had just slightly, just a little bit, changed their approach, they could have developed their skills much more easily, with much more enjoyment and fun. In my 20+ years of coaching developers, I've only ever had less than 5% of them think, "This person is truly not cut out for development."

This training is designed to give you a rough idea of what “just a slight change in method” can mean.

Target

Suitable for anyone who wants to get good at programming .

• Aspiring programmers who are about to get a job or change careers

• People in jobs where programming skills are helpful, such as researchers, data analysts, designers, and planners.

• Current programmers looking to improve their work skills and develop their careers

This will be especially helpful for those who are unsure about their programming study methods and feel like their skills aren't improving much no matter how much they study.

What are the instructor's qualifications?

I have " expertise in expertise ." At a time when deliberate practice was still largely undiscussed in Korean psychology circles, I contributed an article on deliberate practice and programming to the April/June 2005 issue of Monthly Microsoft Software. Academically, I consider Anders K. Ericsson, who coined the term deliberate practice, and Gary Klein, a pioneer of the naturalistic decision-making school, to be my mentors, and I have personally studied under Klein.

Some of the projects I have worked on related to my expertise include:

• Professional analysis and HR proposal consulting from a large corporation's marketing team leader

• Analysis of the expertise of the top 1% of call center consultants at large corporations, improvement of the training system, and coach training

• Experiments and consulting to improve the program design expertise of small and medium-sized enterprise developers.

• Professional assessment and training of psychological counselors

• Research and competency model consulting on the expertise of outstanding PMs from consulting firms

• A study on the expertise of "change makers" in the process of bottom-up organizational change in large corporations.

• Project to improve the expertise of C-level executives at large corporations

• A project to quickly improve the programming expertise of biology PhDs working in the field of bioinformatics.

etc.