This is probably true for a lot of other things. Learning an instrument, learning karate, etc. basically its easy to get started than to keep going.
exactly!
Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
11–20 of 270 posts
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#12In my experience, this graph looks similar if you get hired at the first peak, but the desert of despair doesn't dip as low as long as you have some form of mentor or reviewer for your code. You can, of course, get hired to a bad job and the desert will dip further down (and your risk of leaving the industry increases).
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#13I always thought the "Desert of Despair" was the point at which you should find a mentor with professional experience, instead of waiting for the "Upswing of Awesome".
That probably depends on the individual. Some people are more self-motivated than others and may be able to make it to the upswing without a mentor.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who is currently learning how to code, the author gets it mostly right. For me, the hardest parts of programming as a beginner - understanding OOP, data structures, etc. - didn't really 'click' until I stopped reading tutorials about them and start writing my own programs. The idea of 'objects' and 'instance variables' was mind boggingly confusing at first, but once I stopped worrying about how to make sen…
And math, really. Reading proofs is easy, writing your first proofs is really hard. Most people learn by doing, not by watching.
Yeah, that too. I have a humanities background, but I was always keen on mathematics. I know this is not true for a lot of my peers who studied the arts.
Really makes 'anyone can code' sound more like a marketing slogan than an evidence backed statement. If your math and logic game is weak, you'll have a hard time with anything beyond the most cookie cutter PHP code.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#15For me, by far the hardest part was finding the time. Learning to code on nights and weekends, when you've spent your most productive and focused hours at your job, is a nightmare. It wasn't until I was actually hired as a dev that I started to hit a steep learning curve, and I attribute much of that to spending 50 of my best hours/week coding, rather than maybe 20 of my worst.
From the sounds of it, you weren't at Erik Trautman's "Job Ready" point when you were hired (and weren't going to get there without being hired). How did you write your resume and handle interviews?
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#16I always thought the "Desert of Despair" was the point at which you should find a mentor with professional experience, instead of waiting for the "Upswing of Awesome".
The upswing of awesome sounds like a great way to prepare yourself to build things that are 90% correct with a 10% catastrophic failure rate.
I really try to keep a more emotionally neutral stance on all of my code and my abilities. If I want to indulge in arrogance I philosophize.
In the end, it's the same thing over and over again. Symbols swapping with others symbols denoting some kind of esoterically tangible, but ultimately fleeting, meaning.
It'd be nice to not feel perpetually stuck in the desert of despair though. I used to think being there meant I was learning stuff, because I had intuitively learned from repeat failure that after failure comes success. Turns out you can think about yourself plodding along at a steady pace, with no comparison to anyone else, as long as you stop assuming that there exists a clear, coherent, ordered organization to knowledge.
There exists such a thing in school, or at least the commentary on a topological sorting would have you believe. Technology doesn't always develop and get released in school though. Sometimes it develops in webs that are can not be causally described, because thought and skill do not necessarily travel in measurable directions, nor is their instantiation completely definable/observable.
People apply too many theoretical concepts to describe, dictate, and organize reality without understanding the effect on perception.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#17[deleted]
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#18Really good discussion of what falls apart when these "anyone can learn to code!" tutorials leave you high and dry, and how to get past that next huge hurdle of self-sufficiency.
As someone who is currently learning how to code, the author gets it mostly right. For me, the hardest parts of programming as a beginner - understanding OOP, data structures, etc. - didn't really 'click' until I stopped reading tutorials about them and start writing my own programs. The idea of 'objects' and 'instance variables' was mind boggingly confusing at first, but once I stopped worrying about how to make sen…
I have been coding for a long, long time. Since the 80s. But I got started with the idea that I wanted to 'build' something...I think it was a randomized dice roll or something. Having something you are trying to actually 'make' will cause you to learn what you don't know, and keep going.
It's no different than saying 'I want to build a tree house'. as opposed to 'I'd like to learn how to do construction' or 'I'd like to understand how to build with lumber'. The first statement will drive you to figure out or learn what it takes to make something tangible, the second two statements are just nice ideas, easily discarded when things get difficult.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#19The hard thing about learning to program is that to create anything even vaguely useful you have to learn a million things in parallel.
Say you wanted to build the simplest of Rails apps - you're simultaneously learning not only what the terminal and a text editor is, but how unix commands work, what an MVC framework is, probably a little of HTML and CSS, database migrations (maybe some SQL), asset management/pipeline, some random Rails-specific syntax, probably git, and if the creator of the tutorial is feeling ambitious he/she may throw in some TDD and testing frameworks. And that doesn't even begin to go into Ruby -- the entire programming aspect of programming.
So you're thrown out into the middle of the ocean, and blindly writing code you don't understand (because there's no way any tutorial could fully explain everything you're learning without being 2,000 pages long). You follow the tutorial, you get your little app running, then you realize, "I have no fucking idea what I just did." There's no way on earth you could do it again.
The other approach is to bring you from the bottom up, starting with language/syntax Codecademy style. So you spend a month learning how to almost be able to write a for loop in JavaScript, and then you realize you have no idea why you would ever need to know what a for loop is, and even less of an idea of why it's useful.
I got stuck bouncing back and forth between the two for years (literally), wondering how the other programmers were possibly smart enough that they could grasp meaning from random blobs of tutorial code, or how they possibly had the patience to grind through enough JavaScript tutorials enough that they could actually create something. I finally decided to throw away the crutches and venture out on my own. I think that was the single biggest step in becoming a (decent) programmer.
The timid, "I don't know how to program" side of me said, "Wait, I have no idea how to do this yet. You need to read up on it." But I finally bit the bullet and said, "You know what, I'm building this app right now. No, I don't know how to do a lot of it, yes, my friends that are a lot smarter would probably mock my code if they saw it, but I don't care. I'm building this." I don't think you can ever truly learn to program without saying, "I don't care, I'm building this." It took a long time and more Stack Overflow than anyone should ever care to read, but things finally started clicking. I built a few apps (Rails and iOS), went back to the tutorials, and said, "Are you kidding me? That's what they were trying to teach me?"
There was no way I would have remembered that crap if there was someone guiding me through or holding my hand. Sometimes you just have to start, having no idea what you're doing, and figure it out as you go. That's a foreign concept to people who aren't used to creating things, but I'm convinced it's the only way to truly learn.
Re: Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard
#20When someone asks me "How do I learn to code?" I always say "You don't. You just code."