Learners, what do you struggle the most with?

Hey everyone,

I would like to know what are the biggest challenges you’re having while learning or in your current work:

    • The code
    • What to learn
    • Keeping motivated
    • The interview process
    • Not knowing how my day to day as a developer should look like
    • Understanding/dealing with co-workers
    • Other (specify with a reply)

0 voters

The point of the pool is to get an insight into what are the more common struggles, especially of newcomers and recent hires, and hopefully, me and everybody else in the community can help based on their experience with either advice, motivation and/or recommendations.

You’re incentivized to vote and reply :smile:

frustration / getting overwhelmed

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Other:
My biggest issue is explaining things in a simple way. I don’t have the gift to explain complex solutions in a way that makes sense to people who don’t know anything about code.

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Other
1 getting stuck in tutorial hell instead of starting wiith projects on my own. This was my first mistake
2 Getting the basics of the information but, not everything. Example in the first lesson here Most HTML elements have an opening tag and a closing tag . But why do they have that? And why is it like that? Is it only at HTML our is it everywhere? it is never explained.
3 Way’s things are explained there mostly made by people who are already at a difffrend level as beginners so they tend to be explained in a well developed terms and simplefied things are left out allot.
4 feeling overwelmed for sure is one as well

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Then you simpely don’t understand the subject well enough.If you cannot explain it in the simplest of term. I know it sound like an attack but, give this one a chance and search for Richard Feynman and his lectures. You might understand better if you do so :3

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The “Feynman technique” was recommended to me as well. It includes “explaining” a topic to yourself on paper, to find out what you know or don’t and in this video it is also suggested to repeat that process and simplify your explanation as you go:

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to expand on @michaelsndr and @KittyKora said, it helps me if I try to relate what I want to explain with a real scenario, like comparing an if .. else with the scenario most kids had happen “if you eat your soup you will have dessert else you’re going straight to bed”. The more relatable the better to visualise and to be understood and this applies to everything (everything requires that the other side has some common knowledge like Feynman mentions on his magnet explanation)

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  1. Tutorials are great guidelines and starting points and get confused with “when I’m done with this I will know everything”, is a very common trap in all levels of expertise when learning new things. Ideality you should imagine something useful to you and build it with the help of tutorials.

  2. Wanting all the details of how something works is something you should never quit fighting to understand but in my opinion, it is secondary to getting something done. Especially at the start were more generic info is necessary so it becomes less overwhelming. You don’t have to understand every piece of a car before you drive it if you decide to race or become a mechanic is when you start to specialize. Same goes for HTML, JS or any other language, you first learn the base to make stuff work then you specialize as you need it.

  3. It would be very valuable if people learning would write more articles and post more often with their experiences and how they overcame their struggles. I see that quite a bit in career advice with success stories, which is awesome, and I find that there is a lack of that in the code side of things. Maybe because it’s not easy/welcoming enough the kind of criticism you get after writing articles but Alas, people with more experience end up trying to help by simplifying the way they find better or that helped them understand the problem, it helps some and it alienates others.

  4. @michaelsndr It’s like entering a library wanting to read all the books but knowing that you have to be selective. Going back to 1. it helps if you build your stuff and go from there as you get stuck research what you need for the next step.

Sidenote

  1. tags in HTML whenever they can have content inside them have an opening and closing tag, elements that shouldn’t/can’t have more content inside them close themselves, example <br>, <input>. You learn this as you need them no need to memorize it. You see this kind of behavior everywhere, function in JS has an opening { closing } brackets which means that functions can have content (same for if and for for example), assignments, on the other hand, don’t have content, they are self-contained const whatever = "a string";.

  2. A reason to use the developed terms it’s so it’s easier for you to investigate more on the topic, especially when you’re having an error. You will get better results on google by searching promises in javascript instead of thing that makes javascript read a requests result when it gets a response from the server

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I’m the only Dev where I work at and trying to explain why one solution is better for an issue to my project manager is where I have a problem. He could care less as long as the solution works but I have to tell them what I do because it’s the Army and they are very bureaucratic. I understand the subjects just fine but I will give the “Feynman technique” a look.

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I began studying like 2.5 weeks ago, the first issue was definitely being just completely overwhelmed with the amount of information, where to start? what language to learn? what websites to use? what videos to watch? and the list went on forever. I decided to jump into Python course first because from what i had researched it was the most popular and the easiest language to learn. It was a depressing expereince, i just couldnt understand how to apply it in real life, i couldnt understand how to practice it, it was too scary and too hard. Then eventually i got to FCC and have been here since. I like that you can actually see what the code does here, i also use 2-3 other resourses besides FFC, so like i would finish flexboxes topic on FCC and then i would go over flexboxes on 2-3 different resourses, watch a video or two on it as well and practice it also as i go. This has been the best practice for me, im not depressed about coding anymore, at least for now :smile:

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Other:
Can’t find good project ideas to practice newly learned languages/concepts

This list could be a good place to start

Hi Austin, My name is Kewe Richard, i’m a 20 years old boy who has passion for learning coding and programming: but the problem now is that i’m new to this site and i don’t even know where to start. so i would appreciate if you will assist me to learn and also show me where to start from here. I will be very grateful if you can help me.

Hey Daspinola, It’s nice to meet you here. My name is Kewe Richard, i’m a 20 years old boy from Africa, I have passion for learning coding: and the reason i want to learn coding is because i want to create something on my ow, also invent something that will be useful to the whole world. but my problem now is that i don’t know how to start in this site. i’m new here. I was introduce to this site few days ago: so please help me in anyway you can so i can know where to start coding here.

The website has certifications that cover a very complete stack for web and api development. If you don’t have a clear goal on what you want to learn you should start from the first one “Responsive Web Design” and do them by the order they show up.

You can find them on the learn page here.

A couple of recommendations:

  • Google will become your best friend and you can, and should, ask it everything you don’t understand, don’t feel bad about searching “what is responsive web?” or “how to center text in html” over and over, is normal to forget regardless of experience
  • Don’t look up solutions, it’s more than fine to ask for help when stuck but do give it a try to solve the challenges by yourself or by looking into existing posts about the challenge you’re stuck whenever possible
  • After a successful solution reread what you did and ask yourself “with what I learned so far, could I solve this in another way?”
  • When stuck for some time and the forums and searches are not helping take a break, be patient with yourself and try again later after a run or washing the dishes
  • If you have ideas for projects choose one and start, at first it will look something like “I want to do a website where people can donate for charity”, decompose that into tinier problems like “how to build a website” and “how to connect my website to donations accounts”, keep breaking the problem until you finally manage to google something that allows you to start like “how to show a button on a web page”.

It’s like wanting to build a house by yourself while going to school to learn how to build a house, the school will give you the foundations on how to build it so you hopefully can skip mistakes and by trying for a bit of time to build it yourself you understand where you still lack knowledge and learn stuff that can only be taught by doing, and failing, mostly failing.

Hope this helps, welcome to this community and have fun while learning :smile: