Reason why I’ve asked that in the title is because I am maybe too much of a fucking dumbass to learn coding, I am learning CSS for couple of weeks now and today I am spending hours trying to figure out how to properly blend in codes such as “margin” “padding” “display” “border box” and many more of these bullshits to make something decent looking, but when I apply something it just gets disfigured and all I accomplish is getting infuriated and cussing everything out from a to z, I also use cheat sheet literally most of the times. And often I’ve used help from Chatgpt and even that thing is most of the times unable to help me.
Let me be honest. At times it is frustrating. What you’re trying to do is one of the hardest jobs there are out there. Which is also reflected in the salary.
The way I deal with it is to stop what I’m doing and do something else. I take a break, listen to some music, take a walk, eat something, anything.
There is no cheating, no easy way. Well, there is an easy way but few want to do this, but if you do it this way, it will be much easier.
You probably don’t want to hear it but I’m going to write it up and then in a couple of days you read it and then you decide, ok? Ok!
The easy way:
- Spend a lot of time one each lesson. How much? Until you understand everything about the lesson. You understand what the code does. How it all fits together. If there is more code than just the lesson, then you also learn and understand everything about it.
- The above can be achieved in various ways, it is all up to you to figure it out, either by googling what others do and then you do what they do, or you know how your brain works and then you do what you know works.
- Remember to eat well, get a good nights sleep, hydrate yourself, be social and hang out with friends, exercise, get some sun, etc. You want you to be in the best possible position, your mind as clear as it can get.
- There are ways to approach problems, analyse them, break them down into parts so it is easier to understand them. Everything can be broken down into smaller steps. Look around you. Nothing in your room or wherever you are just popped into existance. There were many steps, it took skills, lots of effort, and time to create. And now it is sitting in your room.
- Ask yourself why you want to learn coding. Money? ok ok, that’s alright. But go deeper. It’s never just money. Maybe you want to impress others, that they look up to you. Maybe you want to help your family, friends, others and money would go along way. Maybe you’re in a bad spot and this is your last resort. It is important to envision what it is you want, what moves you.
And last a hard question: if you got offered a job as a web developer tomorrow and they said, in a year we want you to be so good that you’re our lead developer, managing the servers, fixing errors, adding new stuff when we need it, fast and promptly. We know you’re not there yet but we are willing to give you a year and we believe you if you tell us that you can do it.
Would you take the job?
Anyways, take a couple of days off, then come back and just start again. Your brain is amazing, it just needs time of exposure to learn this coding thing you’re excited about. You got this!
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Majority of us were in same phase during learning, I had been in that phase for 2 quarters in 2021, below helped me
- Find a team ( physical, remote ) to work, learn along
- Start building projects from Week 1 itself
- e.g. put button on a page at particular position etc, start with simple tasks and later keep building complex once
- If you can do a step in FCC successfully, then try to modify that problem a bit and try to solve it e.g. if button needs to be placed in center, then re-do same problem to put button in bottom left / right / center etc
Hope you get my views, “never ever learn or build projects alone”
All the very best
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Coding is not easy but you should give yourself more credit, the fact that you are here means that you have what it takes, just dont give up. mastery is revealed in limitation.
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@Wowreally999 about using ChatGPT
- I would suggest during learning phase do NOT use ChatGPT
- Instead learn how to use Google
- Keep piece pen and paper, to note down min 10 different kinds of tries / solutions you did sincerely ( using your own mind coding muscles )
- Even if you can’t find solution, you can check on ChatGPT. But remember you need to build coding muscles the hard way, there are no shortcuts
Do follow pomodoro technique + Flash Cards during learning phase, to avoid burnout or losing motivation altogether
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Thank you for investing time into writing giant reply filled with attempts for motivation, but the problem is, when I watch a tutorial on Youtube I almost always struggle with the newfound elements or whatever, and when I take a dive into comment section, people tend to praise the creator and writing comments like “wow, this really helped me” or “thank you now I know those”.
Asking for people’s opinion or attempting to gather information about how was everyone’s process of learning that at the beginning solely for the purpose of me being able to analyze on whether or not is my future bright in this particular hobby or not doesn’t indicate that “one has what it takes”.
And why shouldn’t I use GPT may I ask?
you can never ever able to build your “coding muscles” just like one can’t build his/her biceps; by seeing someone else doing pull up in YT video.
You can use once you’re comfortable enough to solve problem on your own and check with ChatGPT how it would have solved it ? Check which solution is better
During learning phase; getting things solved on your own is MOST important.
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If you’re getting frustrated you should just stop and take a break, and go back to the problem when you feel ready.
The job of a software engineer involves receiving constant negative feedback from computers, it’s not a bad thing it’s just how software is.
You should generally expect your code to fail initially until you figure out how to make it work (test driven development is based on this assumption), and it shouldn’t be a source of frustration.
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