Sean is Coding #11: ChatGPT Prompts for Learning to Code

I've gone all-in on ChatGPT and other AI-assisted learning tools. Here are 15 of the most educational prompts I've created so far.

Welcome to the 11th edition of Sean is Coding!

This week, I want to share a bit about how I've been using ChatGPT to level up my learning process and share some of the prompts that have helped me the most.

Since ChatGPT's launch last November, there has been a lot of doom and gloom around how it will put programmers—and knowledge workers in general—permanently out of jobs. The truth is we'll be lucky if it lets us live at all, let alone have jobs.

But there's no putting this cat back in the bag. LLMs are here to stay and those who don't embrace them are going to be the first to be left behind.

Not only that, ChatGPT really is a tremendously valuable tool for learning and knowledge-related tasks. I've fully embraced it at this point. I pay for the pro plan. I have it pinned to my iPhone home screen. I have plugins to access it with a keyboard shortcut. It reads and summarizes my notes for me. I'm all-in.

ChatGPT as a Learning Buddy

But the area where ChatGPT has made the most difference has been in my journey to change careers and become a software engineer. It's like having a chat thread open with an infinitely patient and always available private tutor who knows everything.

ChatGPT helps me in a bunch of ways:

1. It personalizes and contextualizes concepts by answering my questions and having a conversation until I get it.

2. It finds answers quickly by pulling together info from different sources into a clear, tailored response.

3. It expands my thinking by being a creative study partner, helping me create study tools and building on them with new info.

Contextual Prompting

To get the most out of ChatGPT as a learning tool, I try to be very clear with it about my goals, use progressive prompting, and ask it direct follow-up questions to address my own knowledge gaps.

I'll usually start by telling ChatGPT what I already know about a topic. That way, it can fill in the gaps in my knowledge and present the info in a way that makes sense to me.

Here are some examples of starter prompts that I've recently used and which have yielded awesome learning chats with ChatGPT. Feel free to use these as a starting point for your own programming adventure:

1. What are the key principles of clean code and why are they important?

2. How do design patterns help in building scalable and maintainable software? Can you provide some examples of commonly used design patterns?

3. What is the difference between imperative and declarative programming? Can you provide examples of languages that primarily use each approach?

4. How do I choose the right data structure for a specific problem? Can you provide examples of different data structures and their use cases?

5. What are the main differences between object-oriented, functional, and procedural programming paradigms? Can you give examples of languages that represent each paradigm?

6. How can I write efficient algorithms? Can you explain the concept of time complexity and Big O notation?

7. What are some best practices for managing dependencies and version control in a software project?

8. What is the purpose of unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing? How can I implement these in my projects?

9. How can I identify and avoid common programming mistakes, such as memory leaks, race conditions, and deadlocks?

10. What is refactoring, and how can it improve the quality of my code? Can you provide examples of common refactoring techniques?

11. How do I improve the readability and maintainability of my code? What are some best practices for documentation and commenting?

12. What are some key principles and techniques for writing secure code? Can you explain concepts like input validation and output encoding?

13. Can you explain the concept of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)? How does it help in improving software development processes?

14. What are some strategies for effectively debugging and troubleshooting code issues?

15. How can I optimize the performance of my code? What tools and techniques are available for profiling and analyzing performance bottlenecks?

In sum, ChatGPT has been a game-changer in my programming learning process. It gives me instant access to personalized and contextual information that's helped me learn faster and tackle more complex programming ideas, than I'd otherwise have been able to at this point in my journey.

Even if you're not learning to code specifically, I'd encourage you if you're not already to take a hard look at LLMs like ChatGPT and see if there's something that it can help you learn or do more efficiently or creatively.