After finishing the functional programming section of the JavaScript course, I was pretty confident going into the Intermediate Scripting section, since the easy one was a breeze for me (but had the ‘head-scratching’ moments at times). But oh boy, the section was like an insanely fast, derailed train crashing to my head.
It took me 2 days to solve the first challenge, and it seems like the second one would too (as I’m writing this). I’m kind of disappointed in myself since I’m not really new to programming. I finished CS50 and self-studied C#.
I remember being one of the fastest (even had that one time that I was the fastest) students to solve algorithmic problems given by my professor every week. I’m pretty good at puzzles and logic (good, not great, I should say).
Maybe because I’m not used to functional programming, I guess? Or I need to read more JavaScript? Or I’m just getting worse? I don’t even know. Right now, I’m doing my best to motivate myself and remind how far I’ve come, but there are times that I think that I’ve made the wrong choice of choosing programming as a future career. Gotta admit that I’m not really good at design, so that crosses out front end. But with the ‘technicality’ of back-end these days (APIs, microservices, in short: mostly those fancy ‘tech’ words today), I feel like I’m never gonna catch up.
But I’ll keep going. I just have to. Hoping that others who are struggling with the same thing would too.
Sometimes it is a disadvantage, I am the same, pretty good at solving stuff overall. And then you meet the challenge, the hard one, and you are ready to say that you are not good at it.
Take your time, it is not a marathon. You win if you don’t surrender and keep going at it.
It is a useful skill also to know when to ask for help, maybe you missed a thing, maybe you have a typo you are not seeing, maybe you need a different explanation of the problem, whatever it is, asking for help is an useful skill too.
Maybe you are still the same, and the algorithms are getting harder - you need to practice to bring your skill to that level too.
I did CS242 which was data structures and algorithm and derailed like a train as well. To the point where I lost all passion for coding because I questioned if I actually knew what I was doing, I felt completely and utterly stupid. I used to be really confident in my skills until that class and I cried.
At the end of the day its a practiced skill. Just keep pushing and believe a lot of us have been in your exact position…heck I’m still in that position slowly pulling myself out. I read on another post that slowly but surely you’ll actually get the concepts. One day the topic will “click” and so on. So I just keep going and trust that it does get better.
(as I’m writing this). I’m kind of disappointed in myself since I’m not really new to programming. I finished CS50 and self-studied C#.