I wanted to title the subject: “When Does It Start To Click”, but I didn’t want to mislead people, lol.
Hello,
Background:
I am fairly new to coding, I took a Python class 10 years ago and I hated it, but other than that and some program specific Macro coding (that I also didn’t understand at the time or like, lol, and that was about 15 years ago) I really haven’t done anything that involved coding .
Experiences:
I am currently learning to code from “freecodecamp.org” and I am currently in the JavaScript portion (It has been almost 2 months since I started). Prior to this website I tried some free app’s on my phone to try an learn, but writing code on a phone was difficult.
My experience with “freecodecamp” so far has been good. The lessons are easy to follow and there seems to be help in many different varieties (one of them I am writing on now).
The Main Point Of This Post:
I am doing well in the individual sessions and challenges, but I am having some trouble remembering things from a few categories back from HTML & CSS.
My question is: How long did it take you where everything started to click and you were able to put the pieces of the puzzle together without looking at your notes every 30 minutes? I know learning something new takes time, and that no one is perfect in learning something for the first time, but how long did it take before you were confident in your own abilities in coding?
P.S.
I asked one of my friends this question and he showed me this meme
What you’re describing sounds less like “making sense” and more like “memorisation”.
You won’t be able to, and shouldn’t focus on, memorising all of the different commands and syntax. Focus instead on understanding the concepts - HOW does the code work? WHY does the code work?
The professional developers in my social circle ALL have to research things. But they are able to do so because they know the concepts.
Lemme tell you something that I’ve told a lot of people saying the same thing here… You DO NOT WANT to try to remember stuff (unless its CSS, in which case it kind of makes sense, but still don’t try to memorize it to hard just a little basics), you want to try to apply what you learned on some tiny starter projects. PROJECTS HELP YOU LEARN. I just want that to be emphasized so everyone can read it clearly.
By doing projects, it’s going to push you to try new stuff, and features and make you try to implement it yourself. You will 100% going to fail in one of the implementation, and that’s totally fine, WE GOT GOOGLE. It’s 2020, and it’s the age of information and it’s literally EVERYWHERE, try to use it. MDN Docs is a good resource for web-developers.
I understand what you are saying, and I agree with you about not being able to memorize every detail and command there is for that language the first time around, but what I guess what I was trying to convey was the process of seeing a problem and knowing at least the first few steps to take while breaking it down. Also, I guess it’s looking at the most basic parts, when do you know that you need this many variables and this many arrays? When do you stop making the most basic of syntax mistakes, like forgetting a ; at the end of a line? When should you use return in a function and when shouldn’t you use it?
I feel like I ask the opposite question, WHY does this code NOT work? more often than not. What is different between my code and the solution code that is provided?
I agree that the projects help me learn. It seemed like I was looking up more stuff that were in the example then what we have already covered.
I guess what I’m trying to ask is about the basics. How long did it take for you to see the problem and know, in general terms, what to do? That you know when to use a function or an array and the general commands how it works without making basic mistakes like using the return command when you shouldn’t.
I don’t know how long I’ve studied, but I don’t think it’s much over 100 hours. The first 50 sessions or so I have seen before, so that was more like a refresher, the other 60 were more difficult, but everything that has been covered in ES6 has not made any sence to me.
“Why does this code not work” is the single most important and frequent question I ask myself, and I’ve been a C developer for 3 years now. With time and practice you’ll feel more and more comfortable and competent. There is always more to learn.
In a way…never. This is a moving target because you will always be trying to solve harder, or more novel, problems. I often compare learning programming to learning mathematics. This isn’t because you have to have a good math education to code but because the learning progression is fairly similar. When we were 8, learning multiplication and division was a slow, difficult journey. There were tables to memorize and different ways to visualize it, to write, to conceptualize. Word problems brought children to tears. A few years later and we were learning basic algebra and it was still slow, and difficult, and extremely frustrating. But while we were fighting with algebra, we were doing the necessary arithmetic without thinking about it. And yet, in our 30s, we sometimes still do something like 5 x 6 = 56 because we’re friggin’ stupid. (As always, there’s an XKCD for that.)
I’m not big on promising ‘do X hours and you will be doing well’ because everyone learns at different rates. Time and practice help.
How much time and practice you need to feel comfortable depends upon how you practice, how often you practice, your background, the suitability of your learning environment, your stress and anxiety levels, the phase of the moon, the number of days since the last total solar eclipse in your country, the number of ants in the nearest antpile near your home, etc.
I guess trial and error will always be a part of the progress…
HTML and CSS is more make sense… HTML for distributing the role with tag, class, and id while CSS explain more about each role with property. Tag is given from the HTML, but you can make your own class and id. Class can be used in several tags but there is only one id. CSS: tag without dot, class with dot, id with hashtag, follow by any property you want to add. CMIIW…
But it is hard to swallow JS… I still don’t understand its functions… lately I easily give up in reading the instruction and skip it to Get Help. I didn’t Get Help this much when I learned HTML and CSS…
You don’t. I have my code editor set up to catch these mistakes for me, when possible.
Use “return” when you want the function to provide a result to the code that called it and do nothing further. return is the function kill-switch.
This is a good question for debugging. This is the question I ask when I’ve written my code and it’s not doing the thing I want it to. But when I’m starting the code from scratch? This doesn’t help as much.
When it comes to coding, my usual process is
What do I want the code to do?
What inputs does it take? What outputs do I want it to produce?
For each step to get that output, what needs to happen to the input?
Well, in that case… It took me around 4-5 months until I start to know how to debug my code smoothly, but it’s still not perfect. That’s when I start to know what I did wrong. It is also because I made A LOT of projects. It’s like a muscle memory for codes on your brain. You train them and push them, but not too hard. Anyways, yeah, its going to take you some times for you to actually be able process your code and debug them, and the important thing is to TAKE YOUR TIME.
The forum warned me last time I replied that I was sending too many individual reply’s and I should group everyone together, so I’ll do that so they don’t get mad at me, lol.
I forget what its real name is, but I will call it “The Law of Impossibility”, actually “Hydra’s Law” sounds a lot better lol. Either way, it states that “As soon as one problem is solved, two more come to take its place”. Also, I checked out the link provided and I couldn’t find the XKCD reference to it lol.
Okay, I understand, "Rome wasn’t built in a day. /but probably an extended weekend with some Game Developer’s who had some time to waste/ " (lol)
To All:
Thank you for you taking the time and effort to reply to me. I am getting it through my thick skull (hopefully) that these type of mistakes that I mentioned are common place and that there is no real click moment but a continuous journey that just gets harder down the road, and if you look back you see the path that you left behind and are able to walk back and retrace your steps to see how you can move forward.
I don’t know that I would call it sad, personally. Coding is a matter of figuring out logical puzzles. With logical puzzles, you think and tweak and think and tweak until it all falls into place. Sometimes you have to erase a piece of the crossword or Sudoku before you solve it.
@JeremyLT
I guess I was only looking at a beginner’s perspective
@ArielLeslie
I saw the original link, I got it, but I didn’t think it was that funny (actually I solved the formula that they used to make that table )
I guess its a question of if you like those sorts of puzzles. I liked them before I started coding and then found more puzzles like that once I began coding.
lately I easily give up in reading the instruction and skip it to Get Help. I didn’t Get Help this much when I learned HTML and CSS…