TLDR
If you want to be a good, cutting edge developer, code has to be one of your hobbies. Somehow, some way.
In addition to your day gig, you’ll find yourself reading, experimenting, sandboxing, building a project, going to meetups, and attending conferences. If you’re on the next-level tip, you’ll be contributing to open source code, technical blogging, teaching, or giving talks at meetups and conferences.
I’m not saying that we have to do and know everything all the time, even though some people manage to, somehow. But if we want to keep up we have to do some of it regularly.
The only way to learn code is to write code, ultimately. Like learning a spoken language, it’s not something you can get from reading or watching tutorials. The physical act of typing, problem solving, struggling, researching, and building muscle memory for those repetitive bootstrappy chunks are the processes that ingrain a new language in the skillsets section of your mind. We’ve got to build those new neuron pathways every way we can.
Sometimes you just need to know enough to understand the high-level concepts, the pros and cons, and the state of the ecosystem.
But there have been a few times where I’ve watched tutorials for hours, understood everything, and then sat down with my laptop, fired up the IDE, and couldn’t for the life of me bang out snippets and examples, e.g. “Hello, World”, without googling or reading documentation.
Dino-Coding 