If you could wave a magic wand and make your biggest challenge when you were learning to code disappear, what would you choose to change?
Ali Spittel
Posted on • Edited on
If you could change one thing about learning to code, what would it be?
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Latest comments (91)
I usually mix coding and graphics. Graphically seeing your code results gives you a thorough understanding of what you are doing. And it's so much fun!
The $&* measuring side to most commercial development teams. Indeed, it has been one of the most bruising sides of developing software. One thing I absolutely can do is to build solutions end to end. This makes people feel uncomfortable. What should be a benefit to the team - that I acquired a lot of additional skills working on my own projects becomes weaponised to hide their insecurity. We all have weaknesses and things to learn and a personal goal is to learn from other people.
My last few contracts have been thoroughly unpleasant, and at the heart of this is somebody with a massive ego who doesn't want to think there is a better way.
So in short, it is overly-competitive people who are willing to throw you under the bus for another paycheck. This includes managers and the like.
A book or somebody who can explain things well would help tremendously.
Sometimes a book would just say do this and do that and something will work without never telling you what is going on and why. One example is React, Redux, and React-Redux, and Redux Middleware.
Honestly Physics and Math are not that difficult if a book can explain it well. It is better in USA: I have read some good textbooks. In some textbook I have read in Asia, it was written as if it was to confuse you.
Somebody may says things, and I don't know if they really intentionally try to confuse you or what it is. Let's use something you can familiar with: can you make chocolate in the form of a rabbit? You know the answer is "melt it and pour it into a rabbit shape container". But that person will tell you this, "the textural composition of chocolate allows it, although the artistic craftsmanship factors in this task as well.
I would have loved to learn Assembly -> Java -> C++ instead of Java -> C++ -> Assembly. I'm very much the type of person that likes to learn the building blocks before I learn the big picture as I understood Java ok, C++ I was lost as to why my program kept blowing up (hitting unallocated variables and memory usually). Once I learned assembly, I learned exactly why I was messing up in C++, but I was already a semester passed that class.
I would learn it in school. I wanted to, thought to, but was ultimately intimidated by the idea of majoring in CS. Honestly wish I had :(
I wish I'd have learned the core principles and fundamentals of the language first, but today it's nearly impossible to not get sucked up by one framework fanbase, especially in JS.
Thanks to this, it was super hard for me to pick up new languages and so on.
Well firstly, I want to rephrase this a bit, because I think if you're not being challenged, you're not really growing, and that feeling of growth is one of the biggest reasons I love to learn! When choosing between learning new things, I almost always pick the one with the most obstacles to overcome (if I have the luxury of learning at my own pace, that is). I think your title phrases it more to my liking, so I'll answer that one 😄
For me, the thing I'd most want to change about learning to code is hard to describe 🤔 It's whatever it is that makes other people want to stifle my curiosity and exploration, just because they know the "right" way to do it.
It's a hard thing, as a teacher, to resist the urge to "correct" your students and opt to guide them towards success instead. But I think it's something we should all strive towards when mentoring others, because learning the hard way is the only real way to understand something: tips, tricks, shortcuts and hacks are better left for people who already understand the magic, I think, because you're using them with a fuller awareness of what they are abstracting.
More docs!
I will love a "cleaner" code example on tutorials, what I (personally) believe is that a website should be "working" first and later we can go to CSS and give a personal touch. Is really awkward and hard for me to understand an example full of CSS attributes and a lot of "div" tags, looks like web developers use a "div" even for add another tag.
Every time that I google about any issue that I face, as a newby I miss trying to separate an actual function from div/span/col/etc, and you may say "you will need -classes- for a lot of things", well I'm not talking about that kind of code.
An infinite battery to net/notebooks... and one programming language to rule them all.