I’m clicking my mouse as fast as I can but nothing is happening.
How many clicks until my awesome app is finished?
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I’m clicking my mouse as fast as I can but nothing is happening.
How many clicks until my awesome app is finished?
There lies your problem, ditch mouse use vim(neovim if want to impress the ladies).
vims that thing were you type emoticons everywhere right? :q :w :e
It's 2024 we only use emojis now 😎
:u :w :u
As a developer I object to your assumption that I need a mouse to do my job. The only thing I need a mouse for is outlook and I'd definitely be more productive without it.
This is my imposter syndrome.
I'm a senior engineer now and I'm a big mouse user. It's more intuitive for me. My productivity is certainly not bottlenecking on how fast my hands move on the keyboard. .
My productivity is bottlenecked by the number of meetings I have to attend, random slack messages that need to be responded to, and distractions IRL.
I'm not going to shame anyone about using a mouse unless you also always right click to copy/paste.
Nah fuck the haters, the keyboard-only workflow may be technically more productive, just like a Dvorak is better than a QWERTY, but what matters is your output and your quality.
People will spend hours learning things that save them seconds.
One of the best programmers I worked with was a hunt and peck typist.
His code was meticulous. I frequently learned things reading his PRs.
Pair programming with him otoh....
I choose to eschew my mouse when I can because it's easier. I don't have to move my arms around as much, and I can work quicker. It's more comfortable. All of this is a preference thing, why should anyone do something my way if it's not how they prefer?
Great perspective. If we are codeving or screen sharing, I'm fast and fluid. I just move differently.
Skiing vs snowboarding
"If you wish to be a writer, write."
Epictetus delivered this burn over 1900 years ago.
Is that actually a burn? It depends on the context.
It's the same thing whenever I hear somebody say "I wish I could draw like that." You probably can, but it would take hundreds of hours of practice. Of course, people wish that there was some shortcut, so that they could get the skill without all the work.
Yeah but I feel like there's a million books been written since that time which point out how vapid this quote is. To write one must know what you want to say and how to convey it, do you really think it's better to just dive into a task unprepared and muddle through rather than learn first the structure and ideals behind such work?
I would say both. You need to learn by trying things out, making your own mistakes and finding a style. Then you get input from the outside world on why some peculiar structure make sense or just giving helpful tips. Then you try out more, apply those tips and see what works for you. But you can read as much helpful input as you want, it won't be any good without you trying to apply it and practice.
At the end of the day, both are required. You need to study to be effective at what you're doing, but at the end of the day the only way words get on paper is writing. You'll also get more out of learning these structures and ideals trying to apply them after you have a bit of time just floundering, getting a feel for the actual task.
Fuck me right in my ADHD. But it is true
Pick a language. Keep it simple. Make something.
Bonus points if it's something very simple that you'll use.
Tic tac toe. Fizzbuzz. A score pad for a game. Something that can theoretically be done in an hour (if you were an expert).
Don't forget to RTFM
Someone documented enough of a thing to call it a manual?
Manual? You mean the half-finished wiki someone put together that is the only source of information while also missing the information I need?
If anyone genuinely feels this way and wants to get started in coding, I highly recommend doing one of the mooc.fi courses. Codecademy is fine as a taster/refresh but don't waste money on the premium when something like mooc is available for free.
For many, like me, coding just isn't how our brain works. Even if we are interested in it it's basically impossible to get a grip on it. I can figure out code that's already written and do basic editing of it but anything more than that just doesn't click no matter how much time I spend trying to learn.
It takes 3-6 months for the concepts to click, speaking from experience.
The funniest thing for me is that the definition of object oriented programming is a source of confusion as a beginner yet the most succinct definition as an intermediate/ expert.
It's just telling the computer in a very detailed way. Are you monolingual? I think the concept of learning how to code is easier if you speak more than one language.
I want to preface this with the mention that understanding other people's code and being able to modify it in a way that gets it to do what you want is a big part of real world coding and not a small feat.
The rest of my comment may come across as "you're learning wrong". It is meant to. I don't know how you've been learning and I have no proof that doing it differently will help, but I'm optimistic that it can. The main takeaway is this: be patient with yourself. Solving problems and building things is hard. It's ok to progress slowly. Don't try to skip ahead, especially early on.
(also this comment isn't directed at you specifically, but at anyone who shares your frustration)
I was gonna write an entire rant opposing the meme, but thought better of it as it seems most people here agree with me.
BUT I think that once you've got some basics down, there really is no better way to improve than to do. The key is to start at the appropriate level of complexity for your level of experience.
Obviously I don't know what that is for you specifically, but I think in general it's a good idea to start simple. Don't try to engineer an entire application as your first programming activity.
Find an easy (and simple! as in - a single function with well defined inputs and outputs and no side effects) problem; either think of something yourself, or pick an easy problem from an online platform like leetcode or codechef. And try to solve the problem yourself. There's no need to get stuck for ages, but give it an honest try.
I think a decent heuristic for determining if you have a useful problem is whether you feel like you've made significant progress towards a solution after an hour or two. If not, readjust and pick a different problem. There's no point in spending days on a problem that's not clicking for you.
If you weren't able to solve the problem, look at solutions. Pick one that seems most straight forward to you and try to understand it. When you think you do, give the original problem a little twist and try to solve that. While referencing the solution to the original if you need to.
If you're struggling with this kind of constrained problem, keep doing them. Seriously. Perhaps dial down the difficulty of the problems themselves until you can follow and understand the solutions. But keep struggling with trying to solve little problems from scratch. Because that's the essence of programming: you want the computer to do something and you need to figure out how to achieve that.
It's not automatic, intuitive, inspired creation. It's not magic. It's a difficult and uncertain process of exploration. I'm fairly confident that for most people, coding just isn't how their brain works, initially. And I'm also sure that for some it "clicks" much easier than for others. But fundamentally, the skill to code is like a muscle: it must be trained to be useful. You can listen to a hundred talks on the mechanics of bike riding, and be an expert on the physics. If you don't put in the hours on the pedals, you'll never be biking from A to B.
I think this period at the beginning is the most challenging and frustrating, because you're working so hard and seemingly progress so slowly. But the two are connected. You're not breezing through because it is hard. You're learning a new way of thinking. Everything else builds on this.
Once you're more comfortable with solving isolated problems like that, consider making a simple application. For example: read an input text file, replace all occurrences of one string with another string, write the resulting text to a new text file. Don't focus on perfection or best practices at first. Simply solve the problem the way you know how. Perhaps start with hard-coded values for the replacement, then make them configurable (e.g. by passing them as arguments to your application).
When you have a few small applications under your belt you can start to dream big. As in, start solving "real" problems. Like some automation that would help you or someone you know. Or tasks at work for a software company. Or that cool app you've always wanted to build. Working on real applications will give you more confidence and open the door to more learning. You'll run into lots of problems and learn how not to do things. So many ways not to do things.
TLDR: If it's not clicking, you need to, as a general rule, do less learning (in the conventional sense of absorbing and integrating information) and more doing. A lot of doing.
I would attribute this to the difference between programming/coding, and software design or engineering. They're related but different concepts. Just like a builder and an architect do different things and complement each other to get a building built, these are also two distinct steps. I do think it's easier and more common for one person to (be able to) do both tasks than in my analogy though, but it's also done separately often enough (in industry).
My point being: don't beat yourself up that you don't know programming, you probably do, it's the software design that you're not familiar with yet. But now that you know what is missing, you can look into it and work on it, and gain a valuable skill to complement your existing skill.
I definitely feel this. I had to take a programing course in university and I was easily able to follow along up until the lesson on pointers, whereupon I completely lost the thread and never recovered.
I've known a good number of computer scientists over the years, and the general consensus I got from them is that my story is neither unique nor uncommon.
Hold on, no one said I had to learn to know how to code.
I started a CS club in college and it was crazy how many members would tell me this. They would ask me questions like I hadn't picked up programming the year before and taught myself via the internet. If you want it, it's out there.
Classic result of a business man in charge of a software company.
LPT: work for a company where the decision maker comes from an engineering background, not a business background.
You're welcome.
I mean there must be a reason why someone would want to be a dev. I would go from there
What if I wanna learn to code because I want to make more money than what I'm making now but lack creativity to make something like a game or an app that's supposed to be good practice?
Learn finance and bookkeeping; work for a bank. Software development is not lucrative; the high-paying jobs are fundamentally tough and cause burnout. Median employment at big software companies is maybe 2-3yrs and it will ruin your ability to relate to other humans.
Or work for a software development related to finance and bookkeeping so you get the downsides of both.
You don't need to make something unique, if your goal is to learn.
The best thing you can do is to build something that solves a problem for you, or to build something that already exists that you know well.
As for money, given that companies seem to love layoffs lately, I would say that higher salaries only matter if you are employed. It's an employers market right now, and a lot of people are really struggling to find work again, even from large companies like Amazon and Google.
I try to keep an eye out for repetitive tasks that might make good projects. I just started a python script that's going to download all my google photos so i can free up my cloud storage.
Sometimes motivation can make your better in forced way
Your case same like mine actually. in the end i forced to learn programming because it's digital era & everything will be digital at some point, at first i admit i suck at everything but as time goes on i can made something better and better
I still remembered the first time i forced my way i learned about programming world especially web dev 14 years ago. I learned WordPress, why i learned it ? because it can make website really really fast, it's high demand in my country (even today), you can make easy peasy money with it since my client doesn't care about what tools you used as long as the website is launch and meet their requirements, & it suits for client that have very tight budget
Think of it more like problem solving. Plenty of jobs use software engineers just to code bespoke tools suited to exactly what they need. Someone else will tell you what it should do, you just have to translate that into code. The hard part is more figuring out what they really need/want because what they tell you isn't always what they want.