Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

I agree with you on a certain level, since there are so many outside factors influencing how quickly you can become a good programmer. It's not as if you are an average programmer for 10,000 hours and then you magically become a great programmer in the 10,001st hour.

That being said, I don't think the estimate is totally wrong. I've been programming for five years, have just gotten through a Software Engineering degree and am comfortable using three or four languages, but there are many people around me with more experience who's development skills I am just in awe of.

The main point is that nobody can teach themselves to be a programmer (or at least a good one) in three days. To build up the amount of skills and experience required takes many years.

Relevant Marcus Aurelias quote:

"Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again." (Meditations 2:4)

This is how I do it.

I just started working with python about 3-4 weeks ago. No experience other than html, css3 and graphic design.

So I started doing some online classes but they were so boring and simple that I finished them within a day or two. I actually started doing Udacity's CS class when they teach you how to design a search engine, however half way through I realized that this can be done twice as faster with tools that already exist.

From there I read some Django docs, installed it but django was the most confusing framework to me (not really sure why, just didn't like it)

I stumbled upon Flask and I fell in love. Without any knowledge of how to program and how things work I simply started coding, working with db (postgres). Within a week or so I designed a small blogging application that lets you register users, each user can upload photos, create docs and delete them. I try to code very neatly, and comment on everything. There are a couple of solutions for everything so if I find a better solution I comment out the first one and apply another one.

PS. Don't code for 12h straight. Go out. If I don't know something, I seek for direction, not an answer. I also walk away from my comp and think about a solution, and these tend to be very easy and can be done with a few lines of code. I guess I use my creativity to solve code problems.

Also write everything in small chunks and reuse.

Right so, do we get to shrug off people with less than 10 years experience? Sure would end a lot of arguments.

Lesson 1: Figure out why the URL isn't loading the required page.

Hint: ?