So my 24 yo son and I both decided (today) to learn coding. We are 17 exercises in and we are miserable! Does it get more interesting and less tedious or lis this a sign that this isn’t for us. My son has a bachelor’s degree and media art and animation and I thought it would be great for him to get some experience in coding to get his foot in the door somewhere but I am seriously rethinking this. Any advice or comments are appreciated.
@cojo,
it’s sad to hear that you both are feeling miserable. Learning to code is like learning another language. It is not an easy thing to do and it may sometime feel tedious, repetitious and boring.
But coding can also be fun, exciting and interesting. It all depends on how you look at things.
If it is hard for you at the start, that does not mean you should rethink this all together, but it might mean that you need further assistance with the places you are having trouble with.
To quote Theodore Roosevelt,
“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
If there is anything this community can do to help you out, please feel free to reach out.
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Come on, be realistic.
It’s just your DAY # 1.
Coding is mostly reading and staring at a screen full of goobly gook text and symbols… Thinking… then typing a few more lines of goobly gook… then repeat. — and yes, sitting down for long periods of time, staring at the screen.
It’s not like in the movies where the leading actor just plops down on a keyboard, fingers flying and after a few minutes declare “There, I’ve created a virus that will infect their alien ship.”
Also, part of coding is a never-ending learning process… never… ending. Never… going to end. When you’ve finally mastered something you started a few years ago, now it’s been replaced with something newer and better… and you repeat the whole process again to learn this new thing.
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Didn’t mean to be unrealistic. It’s just my son learned software and how to use tools with media art and animation and enjoyed it from Day 1 so I was wondering if coding was something you knew from the beginning if it was your thing or not.
I can understand that. With animation, you get instant gratification. You create a 3D model, apply materials and lighting and render and voila! – you have something pretty on your screen that you can show to everybody. But animation can also be long and tedious… keyframing, getting the timing right… and rendering 29 frames for just 1 second of animation.
With web development/programming, I guess the gratification is in solving a problem, or making a creation and knowing that hundreds/thousands/millions? of users will see and use it daily. Seeing something you made come alive, and do something useful/helpful for other people. Or creating something functional and a beautiful design.
If your son is more of a visual guy and wants to learn coding, check this out.
https://processing.org/
https://processing.org/examples/
This uses Java, and you can have instant gratification while learning to code.
Then you can transfer that program you created for the web via P5JS.
p5js.org
https://p5js.org/examples/
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There are two possibilities here. One is that you just aren’t a fan of writing out HTML markup and CSS (I can certainly sympathize with CSS. HTML gets more interesting once you start learning about the DOM). That doesn’t mean you don’t like coding, it just means you don’t like writing markup and/or stylesheets.
The other possibility is that you’re not particularly abstract thinkers — you prefer visible/tangible results to abstract structure and logic. If this is the case, then it’s possible coding isn’t for you.
However, I agree with what others have said — you won’t know until you give it a chance. And 17 lessons is barely getting your feet wet.
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Sure, go ahead…dash all my dreams. Now Im going to have to rethink what I tell interviewers when they ask where I see myself in 5 years. 
My daughter is majoring in animation, so I get what you’re saying…to a point. While right now she can create super cool things very quickly, in reality, it was a long road to this point. She has always loved to draw, and cause I do the mom thing, I have saved a bulk of her drawings through the years… boxes full of her phases of drawing nothing but shapes, of the body in various stages of movement…several months of drawing nothing but eyes (that was kind of creepy lol) she’d get annoyed, sometimes angry, sometimes even bored and just drudging through it, and Id be like…uh, dont you think you wanna draw something else? And she’d say nope! I want to get good at drawing eyes…
To me that seemed painfully tedious…like, slay me now. But when I see the things she creates now for class, I am completely blown away. And to her…it wasn’t tedious, she enjoyed every moment of it, even if it was challenging and frustrating at times. If she’d never drawn a day in her life and then started animation, it would not have been so awesome and cool from day one… In fact, Day one happened many years ago, its just that now she has another platform to use the skills she already developed to build something super cool.
Programming is a lot like that… you start small with the little bits that help build your skills and help you understand how things work. Its challenging, hard and at times annoying but… if you like challenges and figuring things out, you will be too intrigued with the process and where it will eventually take you to stop. And I think that is the key, you have to really enjoy challenges, puzzles, mysteries, figuring things out…along with a lot of time not even typing, just staring at your monitor thinking…thinking…with bouts of “WTF”, and threats of throwing you laptop in the nearest river(or maybe thats just me lol) cause thats pretty much what this is all about.
Anyway, 17 challenges in…like others said, really is nothing. Thats not even really giving it a chance…I mean, unless you really, really hate it and don’t actually have the drive or desire to go on, I’d say give it an honest shot. Something that comes to mind…why do you want to learn to code?