Ask HN: Wanting to become a programmerkeep running into problems

#1

Post by frustrated_me » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 1:09 AM UTC

Hi all...Little bit of background. I am 43 years old and have been working as a sysadmin type person for the last few years. I have some scripting skills (bash, perl, python) that I acquired as part of my job. I do not have formal comp sci education.

I have been wanting to learn how to become a "decent" programmer with the following goals in mind to move towards on a _professional_ basis (aka make some money doing) - AI, machine learning, potentially game development.

Anyway, towards that end, I have been doing a bunch of research and tried a couple of things but keep running into issues. I have started MOOCs and never finished due to getting frustrated on the problem sets. Looked into Python (CS61A, MIT 6.001.x), Scheme (SPD1x)..tried going through SICP (got destroyed at the first chapter), HTDP2e (stopped again)...

Partially it is due to the lack of time to actually devote to psets, partially due to getting frustrated and giving up too early....probably I am not doing things too efficiently and all over the place... I find the problem sets too difficult at times and just get frustrated and start looking at other options which is I am guessing the crux of the issue.

Does anyone have any advice?

Re: Ask HN: Wanting to become a programmerkeep running into problems

#2

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 1:48 AM UTC

I think you know exactly the reason. You've even written them down.

There is no easy way around, it's not supposed to be easy. If it was easy anyone would be doing it.

One piece of advice is you should have some sort of concrete goal in mind. It's so easy to give up if you're learning it without a clear goal. When I taught myself to code I didn't learn it because I want to be a "good programmer". I learned because I had an idea and really wanted to build it. Unlike most people I had 0 mentors and my learning was 100% dependent on the Internet. So sometimes I would go on for days trying to figure out something which turned out to be as easy as one line of code. That's why Stackoverflow is your best friend when starting out.

Conclusion: Put yourself in a situation where you can't give up, and remember that "I can't find time to..." is just an excuse you tell yourself to rationalize in 99% of the cases.

Re: Ask HN: Wanting to become a programmerkeep running into problems

#3

Post by frustrated_me » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 2:25 AM UTC

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #2

I think you know exactly the reason. You've even written them down. There is no easy way around, it's not supposed to be easy. If it was easy anyone would be doing it. One piece of advice is you should have some sort of concrete goal in mind. It's so easy to give up if you're learning it without a clear goal. When I taught myself to code I didn't learn it because I want to be a "good programmer". I learned because I…

Cool. I understand what you are saying. Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Re: Ask HN: Wanting to become a programmerkeep running into problems

#4

Post by chadcmulligan » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 2:54 AM UTC

Maybe try delphi - it's a nice visual drag and drop environment using a variant of pascal. If you're quick they have a free offer on the starter version today (nope it's expired). It's a good easy way to learn the programming part. You can move on to the more complex things then