Coding Is Hard

Learn the fundamentals and keep them surfaced, either through explicit spaced repetition or something that approximates it, such as writing, reading or trying to (re)implement them. Then build up on that. Just don't do more than what you can handle at a time. The goal is to reference at least 80% of the necessary from memory.

I don't think writing bubble sort from scratch without mistakes is necessarily a good demonstration of someone's ability to "handle the basics"

Realistically you will never need to write it yourself unless you're coding in some very specific domains

It's at most a signal for whether or not they remember algorithms 101 or some leetcode exercise, but knowing that they do remember isn't really useful to me

Coding is hard exactly the way painting is hard or sculpting is hard or playing guitar is hard or writing is hard. It is but it's not. You need to put real effort in to learn, some less if you're naturally inclined to it, and many reach a point where they crest ahill and it really isn't that hard at all anymore.

If you're chasing after it as a career and coding feels persistently hard and unnatural, you might be aiming for a career not really suited to you. On the other hand, if you think making software is cool and you're just quite finding it easy all the time, keep grinding and you may get there. At least in this latter case, you'll be grinding on something you care about as you try to get there. If it's just about money (be honest with yourself), that can be found in a lot of places and some of them might come a lot more easily to you.

> I wanted to prove to myself that I was smart, that all the adults in my life who told me I was "dumb and stupid" because I couldn't excell at school were wrong. I was not dumb, I was not an idiot, I could do it.

> And that was when reality slapped me really hard for the first time on my face.

These two consecutive paragraphs seem contradictory.

Context for HN :

It's 2 am here right now. I wrote this post very quickly in about 30 mins on the recommendation of a friend to just take my mind off things before going to sleep. I was not expecting it to get any real attention, and so did not attempt to provide much context in the post.

Genuinely appreciate your comments, especially those with encouraging, emphatic words and guidance. Also great to read your own personal journeys as well.

Although I started learning to code 10 years ago, I have not actually been actively coding for all these years. I have worked as a full time dev professionally for maybe just 3 months, and quickly moved into management roles from there.

My primary expertise today is more towards product management, sales, marketing, etc than coding. I currently work in a Enterprise Sales role, and my goal is still being an entrepreneur and building companies.

Zooming out and looking at my entire history, I have spent very little actual time coding. This is the primary reason behind the struggle I express in this post. I feel frustrated with how much little time I have put into it over the years, and how little progress I have made.

Also, perhaps important to note, I have diagnosed ADHD, chronic anxiety disorder and some level of bipolar as well. I don't like to attach these as part of my personality, but it explains a lot of my impulsivity, grandiose thinking and mood swings, which contribute to my frustration significantly as well. Also the reason why I could never learn well in classroom or with tutors. Self-learning has always worked better for me.

The post is intentionally very generic and vague, and doesn't give any specific examples of what I was struggling with and why, simply because it was more of an emotional post to express my frustration from the past week. I also have not written anything in a long time, so this was a good excuse for me to quickly write and publish something.

I recently started working on a new side project, and I have a team of people working with me, but we have been falling short of hands, and so I decided to get more involved in the development, and things were going great until last week when I started trying to refactor our codebase. I hit many walls with things I did not fully deeply understand, and struggling to keep track of a lot of different changes as I was making them - thus ending up breaking things and compounding my frustration even more.

I am currently strongly motivated to get better at coding. That is what prompted me to talk to my friend, who is the best engineer I know, and who encouraged me to write down my thoughts and publish them.

I am certain that with persistence and consistency, I would get through and not struggle as much as I have in the past week.