So his plan is no online news; only write to GitHub and Twitter, not read; only old time tested books. I don't think you can be a good coder like this.
A lot of improvements to software development are too new to be time tested and encoded into book form. For example, Node scales a lot better than Rails, and maybe there are books about that now and not just everyone hearing about companies that switched, but beginner Node programmers are going to get stuck in massive ugly callback pyramids unless they learn mitigation techniques like Promises.
There's simply too many things a good coder should know that are picked up by reading other people's code. What if you didn't know about A* path finding and had a bunch of buggy, slow, piles of loops and if statements? Then you are doing shoddy work and you are charging your clients more for reinventing and debugging the wheel when you should have just looked up the algorithm.
The other problem I see is that he wants to live in the city, unlike the people he cited who moved to cheaper less busy places like Walden Pond, but he is focusing more on art than work, so it will be tougher for him to make rent. Maybe Loop/Recur is paying him enough he has time for that, though, who knows. Many people in big, expensive cities like NYC have to struggle with multiple jobs.
It depends a lot on what you are doing and your innate abilities and determination. Knuth has captured some thoughts about staying connected via email very eloquently so I will share them here -
"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. "
People ignoring old works is why we have node and people trying to put polish it with promises, rather than people just using Haskell or Erlang or something else with lightweight threads. Or at least something inspired by them.
A lot of improvements to software development are too new to be time tested and encoded into book form. For example, Node scales a lot better than Rails, and maybe there are books about that now and not just everyone hearing about companies that switched, but beginner Node programmers are going to get stuck in massive ugly callback pyramids unless they learn mitigation techniques like Promises.
There's simply too many things a good coder should know that are picked up by reading other people's code. What if you didn't know about A* path finding and had a bunch of buggy, slow, piles of loops and if statements? Then you are doing shoddy work and you are charging your clients more for reinventing and debugging the wheel when you should have just looked up the algorithm.
The other problem I see is that he wants to live in the city, unlike the people he cited who moved to cheaper less busy places like Walden Pond, but he is focusing more on art than work, so it will be tougher for him to make rent. Maybe Loop/Recur is paying him enough he has time for that, though, who knows. Many people in big, expensive cities like NYC have to struggle with multiple jobs.