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One small step for you, one giant leap for yourself

Chris Bongers on June 30, 2022

Many people are following my articles and the articles of many others because they want to become developers. Sometimes I receive messages or read...

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aben • Jun 30 '22 • Edited

Very nice optimistic article, I try each time also to introduce people to programming and lower their frustration. Constant learning even few minutes a day (reading an algorithm or so) is definitely the way to go...

There is a serious catch I believe that paradoxically, results to more frustration rather than less, which is saying to people: programming is easy while it is not, I mean don't get me wrong, I appreciate any work and anything can be either seen "easy AND hard" depending on the skill and improvement. What I want to say, is programming is not like for instance: assembling a table, (or maybe it is?!)
But anyway, if you make one single error the whole program, web-app, visualization, ML model, ... will fail. It is not magic or rocket science but still, it really needs a lot of discipline and patience.

voila, my opinion is that, people trying to democratize technology, maybe not all of them, but many many are selling/giving this impression that it is all low-code, stack over stack over stack, and then just pick your building blocks and make something giant, while in fact it is the exact opposite, it is about learning, designing, developing, testing, then iterate again,

Saying to anyone, hey, you maybe missed it in journalism at university, or not liking it anymore, you can switch and become a full-stack developer in 6 months is "a BIG lie" which will cause frustration more than anything else.

Chris Bongers • Jul 1 '22

Oh no, you won't ever hear me say it's easy
Or you can become it in x time, I actually am very much against those "roadmaps" as they are too generic.

aben • Jul 1 '22

I agree, I just wanted to raise an important point. Programming is not easy at all, and sadly it creates so much frustration. I had a mate that abandoned a PhD in physics and started full stack programming. Of course there might be million reasons for this, career, money, etc.. so this is just an example, the guy is definitely brilliant but each time I pointed to him that this solution even well written, it is bad design and would never scale, no comprehension or a blurred vision on low level Vs high level, opinionated and agnostic, team work, etc..
So yes, again development is not just code that works, it's about design, testing, team work, and so on...

aben • Jul 1 '22 • Edited

Another thing to mention, for him it is all about grasping the next version, and the best library for instance React is a must, while I was arguing the solution works fine with plain JavaScript and no réactive, clients are smart enough to know clicks and F5s to ask the server, they really know it and know what's an action and maybe after that action the data on UI is not up to date. I focused on backend and supporting thousands of concurrent users instead, and there is so much to learn there already for the curious .