Ask HN: Dealing with a coding brick wall. Go deep? Learn something new?

1 pointsgregormck9y ago3 comments

I'm looking to hear from more experienced developers who have overcome being stuck in their programming career. How did you do it?

Is it better to go deeper into a language (in my case PHP) or learn something new (I'm thinking Swift or Java maybe even Go). On one hand learning a new language makes sense, but on the other hand, I'd like obtain deeper knowledge of PHP. My goal is to be a better developer, so both are probably best to do, but I am wondering about specific things to do to become unstuck...

3 comments

3 comments · 2 top-level

gnode9y ago· 1 in thread

Can you elaborate on what you mean, and what your situation is? Is your problem career progression; that you're not being challenged by your work?

gregormckOP9y ago

Over the last five years I have taught myself to code: mainly PHP and JS. I built various web apps, one that got traction and now pays me a monthly income (enough to pay rent). Building it threw many challenges at me from sys admin to the delights of JS... but it's now not something I'm going to spend a lot of time on (for business reasons). So I am at a natural point of looking to the next five years and what to spend my time learning (and building). I'd like to get to know more developers too. So it's not so much a problem I have, it's more about understanding how other developers went from low/mid competency to a higher level of competency.

smt889y ago

To become a better developer, learn functional programming. I would strongly suggest Elm, which has practical uses and has strong growth among its user base.

If you want to work at a big enterprise, learn C# or Java. If you want to work at a smaller or newer company, learn Python.

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