print “Hello World”

As a CS student, your first “Hello World” sends you to the seventh sky but before you know it, you want to land back on Earth and say goodbye to this world.

But here’s the trick. The more you stay in this world, the easier it gets to stay in it.

Like a newly wed bride in her in-laws, at first you will cry and complain but slowly and gradually, you’ll be dictating everyone else in the house because you’ll know their sick, old tricks like the back of your hand.

There will be people you find extremely talented like they wrote their first print statement in their mother’s womb. But I assure you if you do this one thing, someone will be thinking the same about you in a few years.

Whether it be a disappointment to you or not, that one thing is “practice”.

Practice what, you might ask?

Anything and everything. Practice old lab tasks; practice coding problems from your book; practice a problem one day after solving it because your brain is different and could come up with a new and better solution that takes lesser time and uses better logic. Even if you are stuck debugging it for hours, at least you’ll know the importance of the intricate difference between multiple if statements and the if-else statement.

If you want to go beyond books and lab tasks, practice online. Practice Leetcode. Practice HackerRank.

There will never be a time when you will not have to debug, but this practice might bring forth a time when you are introduced to a problem you have never solved before , but you can connect it to a problem you’ve solved too many times in a way that makes your teacher pat your back.

This is how coding is like any other art. You have to practice it to master it.