Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
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Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#2Well said. I still go through that cycle every time I try to learn something new. Cocoa was really frustrating, especially as the debugger threw me into compiled assembly code. But once I got through the initial hurdle it became much more fun. Had that experience with Django lately too. The best (arguably only) way to learn seems to be learn by doing, reflect(which includes summarizing mistakes, reading tutorials, talk to expects, etc), and do some more. It tends to work out best when you have an end in mind, a real project that you are working on, which is what a lot of coding tutorial fails to deliver.
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#3Agreed. I feel like we are probably the first generation who has grown up with the world's knowledge at our fingertips. Once you know how to use it, every problem seems solvable. Yet still the majority of my friends don't have this attitude. I've forgotten how many times (as the 'tech' friend) I've directed them to an lmgtfy.com link. I wonder what stops people from grasping the concept you're talking about here - from experiencing their own 'tipping point'.
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#4I remember learning to code in Game Maker a while back, so each time I had an end goal in mind: the game I want make. In that time, I made 8-10 crap games, but each time I would code, I would more and more swap out the pre-build code actions with actual code as the complexity of the games increased. Besides the fun of making games, it was great discovering the underlying code, even if it is something as rudimentary as Game Maker's scripting language.
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#5This is something I talk all the time with students that are being taught all the programming classes in college. Most of them know how to program, or at least know the syntax of a language and know basics, but getting to that tipping point of having hacked something up is kinda hard for most people. After you've built that first thing, that isn't the obvious programming exercises found on textbooks, you've passed that tipping point and hacking will then come naturally to you.
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#6Agreed. I feel like we are probably the first generation who has grown up with the world's knowledge at our fingertips. Once you know how to use it, every problem seems solvable. Yet still the majority of my friends don't have this attitude. I've forgotten how many times (as the 'tech' friend) I've directed them to an lmgtfy.com link. I wonder what stops people from grasping the concept you're talking about here - fr…
That's an excellent question. Our current institutions (school, work) are set up so that people by and large respond to commands from a higher authority.
Entrepreneurship gave me the incentive to find things on the one, and also made it necessary.
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#7I remember learning to code in Game Maker a while back, so each time I had an end goal in mind: the game I want make. In that time, I made 8-10 crap games, but each time I would code, I would more and more swap out the pre-build code actions with actual code as the complexity of the games increased. Besides the fun of making games, it was great discovering the underlying code, even if it is something as rudimentary a…
Wow! This is how I learned to code too! I remember when I around 12-13, I wanted to figure out how to make my own message box in Windows (yes, I was weird). But I didn't know there was such a thing as "programming". In fact, I had no idea how software was made.
Eventually I stumbled upon Game Maker -- I think it was at version 4 when I found it. So I began creating little games with that cheeseburger icon and snowmen. Eventually, I realized that this thing called GML would let me do more. When I looked in the help file, one of the functions said to enter an "argument" and I seriously spent like 2 days trying to figure out what an argument was.
Eventually I got a Mandelbrot fractal going in Game Maker and discovered C at that point.
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#8The article is nice, learning by doing is way more effective than just reading about something. I just don't feel very confortable with the word "hacking". This term is so overloaded nowdays that it's almost meaningless.
Anyways, good job :)
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#9As someone with an interest in the programming world, I'm slowly "learning to code". I don't intend on ever developing in any occupational capacity. I'd just like to be able to have both a better understanding of what goes on under the hood, as well as be able to cobble together tools.
But I'm having trouble finding my own tipping point. I've worked through tutorials, online classes and introductory texts. Most of these things have you typing code in an editor, solving very minor problems, and seeing the results. But there's a big gap between, say, typing a little program in an editor, and a full blown web page or game. I understand that when you drill down in an iPhone app, for example, there's code back there, most of which I can't recreate, but can understand on a basic level. But what I don't understand is how that code gets there; how do all the pieces of code fit together to make a finished product, and how do you get it there? It's still sort of a black box to me, and haven't found the resource that can get me across that chasm.
I bring this up because I'm waiting for the epiphany, when I can say what the author does:
>"What had previously been a mysterious and confusing world suddenly started making a little bit of sense."
It's difficult when learning from scratch.
Re: Learning to Hack: the Tipping Point
#10As someone with an interest in the programming world, I'm slowly "learning to code". I don't intend on ever developing in any occupational capacity. I'd just like to be able to have both a better understanding of what goes on under the hood, as well as be able to cobble together tools. But I'm having trouble finding my own tipping point. I've worked through tutorials, online classes and introductory texts. Most of th…
It's probably a lot easier to understand a larger project like a game or a website by trying to implement something substantial on your own. A lot of the obvious approaches to coding that work for small examples don't scale well for one reason or another. In the process of running into roadblocks and finding solutions (typically with the help of google) you'll encounter some of the pieces that end up in something like an iPhone app and at that point you'll probably be in a much better position to understand them.