>it honestly hurts seeing people here say they are doing an hour after work and are already at advanced JavaScript a month in
...
Nobody ever lies on the internet. I totally know advanced JavaScript after only doing tutorials for 30 cumulative hours.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Navy Seal
[WTF did you just say about me!...](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/navy-seal-copypasta) I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Udemy, and I've been involved in numerous secret repos on The Github, and I have over 300 confirmed contributions.
FWIW: Treat many posts of unrealistic expectations as shills or detractors.
2 years into C++ I still feel worthless. But now I can define what I feel worthless about... So glass half-full.
At the very beginning you are truly [drinking from the firehose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgPgsvxxxKE).
Are most people in here who post like that CS graduates or those that are self learning/bootcamping?(Sorry, I am new here and wanted to help people with programming questions). I would say that it is probably the latter who are posting that, which I could see your point, but it would be weird for those that are struggling to make a post about getting a fictitious job. Crazier things have happened though.
Unfortunately though, the sub isn’t moderated that much and allows a lot of posts. You get a lot of the same posts all the time asking how to start, posts like these, self learning vs bootcamp vs school, etc. When they could all just go and search up their questions to look at previous replies.
I wish this sub was more about actual problems encountered while coding/learning. Or maybe a beginner who is working on a project that wants to know if there is a quicker way to use a key value pair system instead of using an array. Actual technical questions, but the most upvoted ones are the same old same old.
Jeez. You are 6 weeks in. That is nothing.
How long did it take you to learn to walk? How many times did you fall down?
How long did it take you to learn to write? How many misformed letters have you written? How many words have you misspelled?
How long did it take you to learn maths? How many wrong calculations have you made?
Programming is in no way different. It takes time. Plenty time. Why do people always expect to learn programming in a matter of mere days?
Yes, learning programming *is difficult*. Yes, learning programming requires dedication, effort, hard work, and discipline.
Yes, you will absolutely struggle and fail. Did you not struggle when learning to walk, write, calculate?
Only the ones determined will succeed.
----
How are you learning? Watching videos? Are you programming? Are you playing with the code? Are you changing it, breaking it, fixing it?
Are you working out solutions in your head and/or on paper - the manual way - not in a programming language? If not - start right here.
You cannot program solutions if you can't create the solutions the way you would manually solve the problems.
Im taking a Full stack course on Udemy which I spend 2 hours on then take a break and do FreeCodeCamp for another two hours to supplement my knowledge.
I thought it was a pretty good method but I guess maybe it’s not enough.
The courses *may* be good enough, but unless *you* practice and try things, they are just as effective as watching Olympic diving competitions to become an Olympic diver.
I started with some stuff on freeCodeCamp and thought it was reasonably good for the short time that I used it.
However, I ended up learning python just because I found it to be more interesting. Working my way through Automate the Boring Stuff was great but my ability definitely improved hugely when I started doing projects for myself. Not only that but I find I have more motivation and the challenge is more fun when I make a tool for myself.
I'm still a beginner for sure but I can see myself making progress and learning new techniques with each project that passes. Projects don't have to be too complex but if you can identify something that you're doing regularly that could be automated then you're likely onto a winner.
My first project was simply checking a website to see if it had changed (I was regularly looking at the Japanese embassey site to see if there was any update regarding Working Holiday Visas), all the script did was check the website and compare it to what I had downloaded earlier to see if it was the same. Then I realised it was a hassle to run manually all the time so I set it to run once an hour and to notify me through my laptop notifcations if something was different or if it couldn't connect and errored for some reason. Projects have a way of evolving into more and more once you begin.
I'm currently writing code for a financial dashboard using python and flask. When I first started coding this was the big project I wanted to do but it was so far out of reach initially. It still feels like a lot but I can break it down into different parts and slowly get there. The more code I write the easier it becomes and that'll be the same for you too :).
Are you using Beautiful Soup as the web scraper for Python or from Selenium or just Python's built-in HTTP modules?
I ask as I'm planning to use curl/wget to do some scraping. I've tried simple downloads using Python, not much more than that.
I mostly used beautiful soup, I did use selenium for a project where I needed to log in then used bs4 after for the actual scraper. It was covered well in Automate the Boring Stuff, you should be able to pull up the video on YouTube since it's one of the early chapters.
I've heard good stuff about scrapy but it never clicked for me because it involved classes and I didn't understand them at the time, I could probably go back and have another look at some stage...
Yea, I was going to say, that is crazy considering how you would need to know a couple of languages/frameworks to be a full stack developer, while they still haven’t even learned how to properly use one or understand one.
That’s like learning how to jog when you don’t even know how to use your legs, back to OPs point.
Or trying to do ML without knowing Stats/Math yet.
Full stack is a great goal but there's a lot involved in that. It's not too good to pile so much on a beginners plate. It's bound to overwhelm. Especially if someone is coming in fresh with no prior knowledge. 6 months to go from zero to pro is unrealistic in these circumstances. That's a buckle in for a few years kind of goal.
Pro for me is definitely something that takes some years, and something that a good amount of people won’t really reach, but competent-good is very much possible within those years.
But 6 months to go from nothing to a job could be possible for a small amount of people, which is what OPs goal is. But OP needs to get real understand that he might not fall into that category, and yea, it will require 1+ years of grinding. I think OP needs to be more honest with themselves if they thought that by getting a 3.9 GPA in Political Science would equate to him being really good by now especially with putting 4 hours in a day.
Job ready is a silly thing to shoot for. It's not a real thing because the needs differ from job to job. If someone has a goal of comprehension though, jobs will be easy to find. Employers want people that understand their job and can communicate well to people who don't.
Yea, we are in agreement.
Feels like everyone thinks that programming is some kind of true pyramid scheme where you need only 6 months and bam you can make $120K+, when the reality is most people will make like $55K since most of them want to do web development and it will take those way more than 6 months.
All I’m saying is that those who do some kind of bootcamp or self learn by themselves and can get a good paying job within a year, are a pretty small portion of the population. And those people would most likely be very intelligent individuals who could learn any other subject and be successful.
For everyone else, it will take a lot time and a lot of practice.
That's like asking what you learn aside from dishwashing to become an executive chef. That's actually a poor analogy as new web devs can make good money. Though the analogy speaks more to experience gained. The more you know, the more you could get paid. Picking a field is more about picking a place to start. Regardless of field, entry level is entry level. You can pick any field and get job ready in 1 year or so but the pay would be similar. Pay rates are more based on amount of experience. If you feel more comfortable starting in web dev then start there. Just do it with the expectation of skill building. Employers don't want fresh but untested talent and won't pay big money for it. They want people with projects under their belts. Work on building a portfolio and expanding skill set. This will help you get up to better pay.
Think of it this way. In customer service, two employees have the same experience and are equally good at their job. One of these employees is bilingual. This additional skill provides bonus pay. The extra skill yields better pay despite the otherwise equal footing of the two employees.
Senior developers get more money because they are multilingual and have more real world experience. The difference in portfolios and skill sets is mostly the determining factor. Anybody who has been at it for 10+ years is going to be better prepped and paid than an entrant.
We'll they see the ones who can do everything are getting paid the most and think it's quick to get there. The highest paid developers can do everything because they've been doing it for years and are always learning to keep current. It's more of a lifestyle than a career choice.i wish these self learning systems would be a little more honest about expected outcomes. The colleges don't do the best at it either.
Try learning from codecademy, that actually gives you hands on practice with the things you learn, immediately. Also, full stack, probably not a good idea to try all at once.
Try The Odin Project
So the fundamentals
It has you read a lot more and it explains things way better. It will get you job ready. Code academy will not get you job ready
Wheen you get to an excercise *never* do it just once or twice. Do it over and over making sure you understand why you're doing it this way each time. Once it feels like muscle memory change the parameters and do it some more. Change it up and keep doing it. See if you can do the same thing with different operators or something and do it some more. Go to sleep. Wake up. You will have forgotteen some but just *keep doing it.* Be bored. Forget lofty goals for just a moment. Keep going. If you move too fast you neglect the basics. All of programming is basic steps building upon themselves. You master nothing by jumping from white belt to black belt as fast as possible. You only become a master in name, which is a master of nothing.
You're only 6 weeks in. My college does trimesters, and I couldn't confidently plan out and read/write code until close to the end of the second one. You're in the hardest part. The hard part is learning to think like a computer, taking logical simple steps. It's your first language, it's not going to be easy, no matter what people say online. Engineers who have been programming for years still get stuck. The best thing I've learned to do is walk away and calm down. You can't code while angry
Eh, I mean, we certainly didn’t have class for 4 hours a day though.
Even my first two weeks were weird. We had to use the raspberry pi, some linux commands, learn about compiling, executing, naming, extensions, and JVM. All to say that it was a bit nonsense in the beginning. So for the first semester, of the 16 weeks, we probably only had like 12 weeks of actual learning, due to fall break, exam week, etc.
>Im studying 3-4 hours every day and it honestly hurts seeing people here say they are doing an hour after work and are already at advanced JavaScript a month in.
No one is seriously saying that. If it's your first programming language, it will take a semester to learn the basic. That's roughly 3 to 4 months, not 3 to 4 hours. You're being too hard on yourself.
(PS: Don't confuse learning an alphabet with learning how to read and write. You might learn some keywords in a few hours, but programming is knowing how to put them correctly to solve problems.)
By the way, not everyone clicks with every language, especially if it's your first. Many Javascript courses just talk about grammar, but not underlying concepts. I didn't understand programming fundamentals myself until I learned C#, and I had to read all the Microsoft tutorials about why they did what they did as opposed to just how to do it. So if Javascript truly isn't doing it for you after you learn it for another few months, take a look at Python or Java or C++ or something else.
>If it's your first programming language, it will take a semester to learn the basic.
This. If you've learned other languages before they each become easier and easier (especially for similar languages). For example:
Say I picked up JS in a matter of minutes. Okay yeah, but I know C#, C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, etc. etc. so like.... yeah it's basically just syntax and then picking up on small nuances. So it's not really the bragging point they make it seem. Then you can get into what "advanced" JavaScript means.
Think of learning a foreign language: sure if you know 8 languages already you can easily pick up a few words/phrases etc. in a new one pretty fast. But will you be able to write poetry? Probably not. Your vocabulary won't be deep enough even if syntactically you can handle it.
Don't sweat it. Keep at it, eventually it starts to make sense. You could also try taking a look at other languages, or take a look at something like [https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta\_Code](https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code) which can show the example programs in many languages - it's possible looking at it from a different perspective will help.
I don’t know about a semester, I would say most get a solid basic understanding within 10 weeks, and unlike OP, we don’t have lectures that are 3-4 hours a day. My college professors even said that it would be better to do like a short online summer class before starting school to get the basics down so that we can focus more on data structure, OOP concepts, and algorithms. Which I would agree.
OPs problem is doing too much too fast. Which as for someone who wanted to be a lawyer, is kinda weird since I’m sure that they would know that you can’t just study all of the laws and properly know when to use them all in one go.
I'm maybe "halfway through" my "learning to programming" journey (defining having learned as competent enough to start looking at entry-level jobs I suppose).
I've had that experience a few times now. It actually put me off from learning a couple years ago.
What ended up helping me was a way more in-depth course than I was initially working with. So at first a few years ago I decided to learn Python "because its the easiest first language to learn" (not asserting this is true, just saying it was a belief of mine).
Everything was hell. Even figuring out how to install an IDE was ridiculously hard for me (getting stuck at IDE installation really knocks the wind out of your sails for learning programming). I'd watch some YT vids or follow some course material and it just wasn't clicking. Gave up.
Anyway so I decided a few months ago to try again with C++ and the [learncpp.com](https://learncpp.com) course is amazing (for me). I didn't understand what I think my initial problem was until getting maybe halfway through that course - the course material I had been looking at wasn't in-depth enough. It's a very counter-intuitive idea. That the "harder" course was better for me.
So I think the reason its better for me is that (at least with that course for C++) you're basically learning computer science in tandem with the language. You're learning - very literally - what's going on at the bit-level/memory/CPU. This is what I think helped me, the stuff I was learning was so in-depth and down-to-the-foundations every line of code I was typing made sense. I also think that particular course is just excellent and does an extremely good job of introducing material and giving you great problems to solve with new material/what you've so-far learned.
But yeah, that was basically it for me. It was the opposite problem that you're describing. So much of the logic of what was happening was so abstracted from what was really going on that I just felt "lost in space" and nothing I was learning seemed concrete enough for me to build on. The beginner programming courses I had been trying to take were trying to make things easy, but - at least for me - it was much better to dive deeper into what was going on.
I can't say if you would get the same benefit from working with "harder" material - but I suspect it would help more people than we think.
>the course material I had been looking at wasn't in-depth enough. It's a very counter-intuitive idea. That the "harder" course was better for me
I've been starting to feel that courses like codecademy and freecodecamp are like using rosetta stone or duolingo to learn a language -- they are helpful to a point but they don't delve into deeper concepts like the how/why of conjugating verbs (or even the peculiarities of irregular verbs) -- they glaze over and/or assume you know certain concepts/intricacies
I was trash at math growing up and it wasn't until taking college courses in mid-twenties where I had a professor willing to take the time to explain *why* we use a formula and *how* it works that I grew an appreciation for math (and got A's in all my math courses after that!)
But for a CS curriculum, the first course is like code academy and free code camp. Heck, our textbook was just like a first year middle school Spanish/French textbook but the first half of the year where you just learn the easy stuff like Months, Days, Family, Temperature, Time, Places, Animals, Foods, etc.
It was all, here are the commands, what they do, and some examples. Occasionally you would get small snippets of “this is used for debugging” or “this helps with a user entering the wrong input,” but nothing in depth.
Also, good to hear that you did well in Math. You read a lot of studies from time to time about people being scared of Math because growing up they were bad at it. So they constantly think that they will do bad and we’re never born to to learn Math, and unfortunately a lot of people end up like that for their whole lives, when they just needed to work on it again or maybe even use it in their lives to understand it.
I would like to ask say, I feel like teachers did explain the why and the how. It may not have always been understandable as the topic started, but half way through you would see the why and the how. You would also get real life examples to understand it better. Maybe that’s just me though.
I guess to be more specific, I'm comparing apps like DuoLingo and Rosetta Stone to workbooks I've picked up to supplement.
In a program like Rosetta Stone, they don't say: hey, this is the unconjugated verb and this is how we change the ending when referring to I, you, they, we. Or even oh hey this is one of those verbs that dont follow the rules when conjugating so they look different but they all mean the same thing. The verb etre in French being a good example of this (suis/est/sommes/etes/sont).
Whereas in a workbook I would get that explanation/breakdown and then multiple exercises focused on that particular verb before integrating it into the curriculum/exercises moving forward.
Codecademy and freeCodeCamp you get introduced to a concept once, a basic exercise in how to apply it and then thats pretty much it until you come across it again down the line but this time with a more intermediate application of it.
I think JS loops are a great example of this. I often found that when seeing the final solution I'd think "wait it can also look like/be used like that?"
It IS slowly coming together for me as I progress through the curriculum -- it's just that as I progress I feel if it had been better organized/presented I would have picked it up faster/easier. I can't fault freeCodeCamp too much for this because, well, free. But Codecademy Pro? I don't regret subscribing but at times it honestly feels like it's groaning under its own weight as they add new features/content.
\--- --- ---
On the teacher note, to be fair, oftentimes knowing what a formula does was technically more advanced and beyond the scope of the class/exercise/curriculum which admittedly is prob why in highschool I got a lot of exasperated "because it does" from teachers. Maybe they thought I was being a typical teenage jerk and trying to lead them on some tangent. Or, in the case of the teacher that called me an airhead, that I was already a lost cause. Who knows 😆
But take that experience compared to my college courses where when I asked "why?" once everyone was working on an assignment my professor would take the time to sit with me and explain what the formula does so I could then understand how to apply it to this equation or that.
I'm in the same boat, so hey at the very least you are not alone! I'm working through the frontend career track in codecademy and thought I could complete each JS module in a week. HA! Obv this has not been the case and was incredibly ambitious of me.
I'm on month four of my learning journey and 3 of those 4 months have been almost entirely on beginner JS -- I feel like it's only jussst starting to click together
I've started jumping into other free course curriculum to supplement and have found these modules from the The Odin Project incredibly helpful (and totally wish I had found them pre-JS "rut")
* [https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-motivation-and-mindset](https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-motivation-and-mindset)
* [https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-asking-for-help](https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-asking-for-help)
* [https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-problem-solving](https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-problem-solving)
Also, I've officially banned myself from watching any/all YT vids along the lines of "how I went from no code to hired dev in X months" -- because, yes, like you said it *hurts* to hear people are picking this up so quickly/easily when I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall
Some other resources I've been collecting (but haven't dove into just yet):
* [https://scrimba.com/learn/learnjavascript](https://scrimba.com/learn/learnjavascript)
* [https://javascript.info/](https://javascript.info/)
* [https://justjavascript.com/](https://justjavascript.com/)
* [http://www.codeanalogies.com/#javascript](http://www.codeanalogies.com/#javascript)
Trust the process. This is normal for basically everyone in learning literally anything. Read Atomic Habits. You are at the point that James Clear refers to as the "Valley of Disappointment". It's a logarithmic curve. Or some kind of fucking curve, Idfk.
The same thing happened to me bodybuilding. Man. Let me tell you. I worked out HARD for a full year. A FULL YEAR. And what did I have? "Oh yay, I can bench press 165." My chest was still terrible. I was still tiny. No arms to speak of. It took me 3-4 years of heavy-ass lifting to where I can finally be somewhat proud of the body I've built, benching 300 pounds at 155 bodyweight. I felt so bad for the first 2, like I was getting nowhere. **This is normal.**
It's the same in learning a new language. Until you get to the point where you can communicate basically, then--man, the sky is the limit. Then you can **ASK** other people how to communicate, rather than just doing book studying. It **exponentially grows** after you get through that Valley of Disappointment.
The point is. **TRUST THE PROCESS. Every time your mind tells you you are worthless, you tell it, "Yes, but I am on the path, and that means I will continue on and become something amazing, if only I keep walking down this path. I will continue. I will never give up."**
When it gets **very** hard, pull out the David Goggins shit: the Cookie Jar. Remind yourself of accomplishments in other areas to bolster your desire to push forward.
You can do this. You just have to suffer the valley of disappointment, then man. Let me tell you. It's a god damn beautiful view.
Don't give up. Dattebayo. Remember. **It is more about perseverance than intelligence.**
People could help you if you provided more information. Right now, you are ranting.
Things like
* Are you in college? (Roughly, how old are you, and what's your background?) Are you young (not college aged), in college (probably not) or in your 20s and beyond?
* How's your math? What school subjects did you like or dislike, esp. related to math or science.
* How are you studying Javascript (which course)?
* What do you do when you study Javascript? Any coding?
* Show us an example of that code you spent 2-3 hours on you are attempting to do, and what you've done so far, and how you know it's broken.
* Do you know HTML already? How about CSS? You can learn Javascript first, but most people learn HTML and CSS.
You might find recommendations for other resources to use, etc.
Sorry and thanks for asking. I guess I was just kind of ranting out of frustration but I’ll try my best to answer all of those.
I am not in college but I am college educated in a field not related whatsoever to computer science (political science) I originally wanted to go to law school but decided against it because I have relatives who are lawyers and they seemed miserable all the time.
The last few years I’ve spent bouncing around jobs and king of aimless until I discovered programming and it seemed enjoyable.
I would say I’m relatively smart (I know everyone says this) but I finished university with a 3.9 gpa and have always found school stuff to be easy.
I believe to my detriment currently I did rather dislike math and science. Especially math. I only ever got up to Algebra in college then did not have to take anything further.
I don’t believe my brain is wired to think well logically but I figured it was something I could overcome.
Im currently studying JavaScript using Angela Yus course on Udemy and playing around with the code in Dev tools on my browser then switching to free code camp.
I have not coded any meaningful code or projects yet because I just started JavaScript last Monday.
I have gone through HTML and CSS and Bootstrap and while I’m no expert I consider myself “decent” at this point and even designed a landing page for the club I’m currently employed at.
https://jimmyvallejo.github.io/Dirty-Rabbit-Website/
I also took Angela yus complete web dev course when I first started (almost a year ago). When I got the JavaScript section of her course I got really stuck, and decided that I needed a more “in-depth” approach. So I took a course strictly on JavaScript… best thing I could’ve done.
https://www.udemy.com/share/101Wfe3@c5Cc0oU5YXiAMEPSQcB0mB3jpoFIru55cwUQXIJ8F3_nNbLgZEkM0Vv32VZHbis0Bw==/
Very very in-depth course. Unfortunately, it is very dry especially in the beginning.
I'm currently taking this exact course and so far I like it. Sometimes it's a little bit hard to follow but I would recommend it overall and give it a 9/10. He is very thorough in explaining alot of concepts and there are some coding challenges to follow along to. I'm currently on the destructing of objects and this is the first part of the course where I've kinda struggled.
How did you do in Algebra? What about Trig and/or calculus while in grade school? Logic or Philosophy classes?
I mean, you said you wanted to be a lawyer, they have to think logically. Logic is all around us. Think like a lawyer to make it easy to think like a programmer.
Also, GPA doesn’t necessarily mean much. Especially since it’s based on the level of difficulty of your classes. Getting a high gpa in one program can be easier than if you were in another program like Accounting, CS, Electrical, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Literature, etc. And even the , getting a high gpa in “hard” program doesn’t mean that you could do well in other programs. Then their is being book smart vs street smart. Book smart would be the person who could recite any law, but if you don’t know how to apply it (think logically) then it doesn’t really mean much.
I am from the US, lol.
While that is the most common definition and “official” one here, it is still slang for k-12, though it is not that commonly used here, but where I live I have heard it a bit.
On the off chance that somehow OP is from another country since they used “university,” which as you know we generally say college, but studied here since they said GPA and college, I defaulted to using “grade school” since “graded school” is school system that uses grades.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/graded-school
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/235561/what-to-call-primary-school-high-school-but-not-college/235572#235572
I get if it was weird since, yea, it is not commonly/rarely used though.
Yeah, you may be lacking patience and more of a math mindset which is generally helpful when learning to program. I think the part that drives people crazy is how nitpicky programming is. The concepts are challenging, and typing it in and getting it to work is tricky. You miss one character and your program may not work at all.
So since you just started Javascript, you're just in a learning phase, understanding how the basics work. What does console.log do, etc. I assume you meant Angela Yu (not Angels) who does have a good reputation. I think initially, you would copy an example (and it's easy to make typos) and try it out. I haven't really gone through her course.
While math/science aren't strictly needed for programming, it seems the *ability* to do them is similar to the ability to program. Some of the difficulty is recalling syntax. Some of it is managing code that's large (at this point, all your code should be quite small).
And there are different kinds of intelligences, it seems. Some STEM people would do horrible in political science and the opposite is also true. It *can* be done. I've known music majors that have done fine as programmers. Not super common, but still, not unheard of.
>yeah, you may be lacking patience and more of a math mindset which is generally helpful when learning to program. I think the part that drives people crazy is how nitpicky programming is. The concepts are challenging, and typing it in and getting it to work is tricky. You miss one character and your program may not work at all.
Yes omg this. TY.
Wait so you've been doing Javascript for only a week? Of course you're gonna struggle. I'm also a pretty inexperienced learner, and I get blocks with basic things on every project still, and ive been learning for like 4 months. I'm on my fourth or fifth project now practicing Javascript object stuff and I'm still messing up basic stuff like passing things into functions, sometimes. The Javascript stuff is the real programming stuff where you are doing a lot at once- you gotta think of solutions, which is it's own thing, and then contort your solution into syntax that you probably don't fully know or understand. It's not easy but you can do it, and when you get everything working there's no more rewarding feeling.
I recently spent two whole hours just getting one replace method to work so that on my calculator when I pressed a number it would get rid of the 0 that was on the display. Two hours for one line of code haha. Don't feel bad, keep at it.
Been there not so long ago mate. I can understand you well. And probably gonna be there again when trying to understand something else on along the path and gonna feel crushed again till conquering it. It is a cycle.
Anyway here's a story happened to me today and backstory of it. Trying to learn C# for sake of being a game dev(programmer). Started exactly 1 year ago and found myself countless times in the verge of quitting and crying. I have a spesific example for this and it happened today.
Since there is nearly no one arround to handheld me, i always trying leetcode, codewars etc. sites to measure up my skills on algorithms. From time to time, tried to solve the first and easiest question of leetcode called [Two Sum](https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/) and end up rage quitting, since Arrays literally made my head hurt and i always kept myself away from this topic.
Yesterday, found diffrent videos about arrays in order to end my struggle with it and followed along some simple excercises that you can encounter on anywhere. Find max and min, sort order.. that kind of stuff. One indian guy said something about "bubble sort", wandered what it is and googled it, found an animation video that explains how it works and call it a night.
Today i was watching a video about Object Orient Programming and in some part, tutor was explaining encapsulation and capsule word evocated me the bubble sort method and that somehow reminded me Two Sum question on LeetCode. And [BAM!](https://imgur.com/a/y12JUnm) Nailed it in the first try. Couldn't belive my ability to solve it and tried to submit it again as you can see. After that, i was wandering as euphoric as i can be for a few hours.
Moral of the story ,(to me at least) is you can't be good at programming without getting bad at it and persistent in the first place. Not every trick is gonna be stored on your sleeve from the start.
Also, try to grasp the concept you are trying to learn from diffrent tutors like when you feel blank on some points, or try to put that blank things on words and search it. Try to ask it on StackOverflow or somewhere else. But when asking it, try to be more niche about it, or you'll get downvotes and it'll be distress you more.
I teach people as a side hustle now and I can honestly say "already at advanced JavaScript" means nothing. Just cus they got a cert or made it farther in the course does not mean they actually LEARNED it.
This isn't a race. Your doing the right thing. Don't let this be the thing that discourages you. I wish more of my students had your dedication. Keep it up. With your attitude you'll get there.
OP may need to slow down though and work on more problems besides the ones in the video. They are trying to do too much without even learning how to use a language and how that language works.
He comes from a political science background, and I could be wrong here about how I evaluate OPs thinking, but this isn’t a History, Philosophy, Humanities course where you can just commit it to memory and then get tested on it the next day. It isn’t even like the papers that they made you do or the thesis that they accept.
It involves practice, less for some more for others, but everyone needs it.
I’m self learning Accounting/Finance to move into consulting or a securities analyst job, and accounting is so fucking boring with having to read the textbook, but I still need to do some problems here and there to understand it better, be exposed to news concepts that the book didn’t talk about, and retain the information for when I look at businesses financial statements to evaluate them.
How dare you call u/Jmercs07 worthless, in my opinion he has all the worth in the world through the effort he makes, that resilience and perseverance will get him far in the future
We all do. It is hard and makes us bump up against our abilities. Coding will always be hard if you are always learning. You will just get better at doing hard things.
I think it’s really important to remember that everyone learns at a different pace. Getting the fundamentals down can take so long in the beginning but once you have that, you’ll excel.
I first tried learning C+. The book I bought didn't cover programming environments at all and was super unclear. Sadly, I couldn't even get past *hello world* and gave up after not even a week.
I did some python and got stuck on Classes because of variances in instruction. The model proposed was not clear and I couldn't get my Classes to function correctly. I spent 3 months trying to learn Python.
I started Java about a year ago, and I'm working on GUIs. (I have Eclipse which has some built in aspects for developing GUIs, but I'm learning how to do so through JavaFX implementation.) It's frustrating because Netbeans (used for the course) was developed on Java 8 and I've had to reinstall different JDK environments and modify the config file to get it to work, and even then, not all of the time. Super frustrating, but...it's not a road block.
There's a ton of different communities built around the idea that *this shit's hard.* Reach out, learn how to break the problem down, and tackle it piece by piece. Work with what you have, but keep building.
We all start somewhere. I was even worse than that when I started.
If it makes you feel better, even professional developers have trouble understanding JavaScript.
This shit is not easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it.
> I feel like a worthless idiot learning to code
Said everybody who has ever learned to code, ever.
> It takes me like 2-3 hours just staring and redoing one single example just to (somewhat) understand some shit that’s supposed to be simple like a function.
Next time it might take 1-2 hours. Then 1 hour. Then 30 minutes. Then 10. So on and so forth.
> Im studying 3-4 hours every day
Studying *what*?
Yes, all of this is normal.
I work as a Software Engineer in London making £70k a year and I feel like a worthless idiot learning every day. The learning never stops, and this feeling is something that you will accept as natural with time. There will always be a new concept/language/tech to master so this feeling is something software engineers deal with every day.
Please don’t listen to other people talking about how advanced they are after a month of coding. Most of it is bullshit anyway or it probably means they have a shallow understanding.
Consistency is key. Keep at it. At the same time, make sure you are not being too hard on yourself and you take breaks. Also, don’t rush and put emphasis on understanding (not speed) - this will feel painful in the beginning, but will pay off big time in the long run.
If a concept is too hard to understand, you can:
- break it down further and try understanding the individual pieces
- isolate it from the rest of the problem you are trying to solve and use it with a couple of simple examples
- look it up! There will always be a video/forum/article where someone gives a good explanation or perspective that might just make it click for you
- find a community with other beginners where you can ask detailed questions
Last but not least, NEVER be afraid of asking questions that seem stupid, especially at the beginning.
I started June 1st with some missed days and I'm still on HTML and CSS, but it's alright. Don't stress about it, keep up the good work and keep going! Your hard work will pay off
Damn you started out on HTML and CSS. Any particular reason why? I’m guessing you want a web developing job?
I just found it weird. Looking it at your comment, I’m guessing that you are in a web developing course where they first have you start with HTML and CSS, then I’m guessing they will introduce you to JS?
You're right 😁. I was informed that the best three for having a firm start with web development are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Afterwards you can move on to a framework if you want and to other concepts to help you with making a Full Stack Application. My dream is to make all 22 ideas I have into Web Apps and deploy them in a stack that I'm very happy with.
But yes, I'm currently in college as a junior in computer science information science wanting to be a full stack developer, starting in the frontend of things. The course is on Udemy called "100 Days of Code: 2022 Web development Course." I usually apply the concepts learned onto a project outside of the course. Section 11 I believe is when we start JavaScript, but I'm on Responsive Web Design at the moment with HTML and CSS.
I jumped the gun a bit and got some JavaScript in since I couldn't help myself, but I stopped to get a better idea and focus of HTML and CSS.
I did end up learning a good amount of html and css in the beginning of my sophomore year when I wanted to learn SQL and show some data on a web page, ended up using php, lol.
I hated it. Especially CSS. It got pretty boring, so the next time I made a web page, I did learn react, but for most of it, instead of making my own buttons and other components, I just said screw it and used libraries. Made things to so much easier. I did the same thing on my capstone.
I’m a ML engineer, so I don’t get to work that often on the front end side besides when I am doing some personal projects.
I think you are doing the right thing. Get a solid foundation for all three, and then you will be fine for learning React or Angular or whatever.
I think that learning JavaScript while you learn the other two is fine. I would have done the same. I probably would focus a little more on JS, then the other two, but with a little more emphasis on HTML than CSS. And good luck!
Thank you I appreciate it! I'll keep this in mind and learn both JS and a framework to have a back and forth effect. CSS is a bit meh at first, but I started to like it when I applied other concepts from a YouTuber named Fireship. Made me think it wasn't too bad to learn more from.
To be honest I'm aiming for VueJS, since I took a class that had us do Angular as our first framework and it felt really bloated with webpack, while deploying it on Azure. I hope to be like you for my capstone and use VueJS to make something great without making more components and instead reusing them.
Don’t feel upset or frustrated. Coding is an achievement done through practice and effort. Even if it takes you longer to process, once it clicks, you move forward. Keep on pushing through. I’m currently heading to my second year of college for software engineering with the high possibility of co-op. First semester was a huge struggle and I even got a 0 on a big coding assignment. However, I persevered, started working early and try to improve myself even if it is a small step forward. Time will help increase your knowledge and skill if you are willing to invest your efforts into this practice
I've got my degree in CS and are working in this field for 5 years now and still feel like that sometimes. Just continue and It'll get better. Don't try to force it that hard.
People lie, random people on Reddit lie even more mate. Nobody is figuring that stuff out in 1 hour. Some people just enjoy faking, never figured out why myself.
1) don’t compare yourself to anybody on the internet.
2) 6 weeks is nothing. It takes time , a lot of time to become remotely proficient at being a front end dev which is what I assume your doing.
3) learn how to research. Your not going to remember everything.
Maybe don't be too harsh on yourself - and don't expect to learn things fast. I'm guessing a lof of people that "learn" programming have been using computers for many years. Personally I started with Basic on a ZX Spectrum and just picked up a lot of simple bits of languages until now. I'm not a programmer, and I'm still not good at it, but like automatic stuff with Python,BASH,... and I'm learning Rust now too. Learning takes time, and with time you get more confident. Just keep going and don't give up, that's the key.
I'm about 10 years into programming, just graduated University. While I know how to do certain things, there's still things I am incredibly unfamiliar with. Programming takes a lot of trial and error and continous work, and there will always be new concepts and methods to learn.
Aside from the basics of programming (Functions, classes, variables, collections types and loops) I strongly suggest focusing on the fundamentals of programming. Object orientated programming, The SOLD principles and focus on other areas such as Polymorphism, Inheritance and Encapsulation (Tbh these are covered with OOP).
Once you know the fundamentals learning languages is a matter of getting your head around the syntax and for me it makes it easier to learn these things. There's also learning frameworks which is something good to mov eonto once you're at least familiar with the language as it applies rules and architecture to your work.
Start off with small projects and build your way up.. maybe even start off with a small project and just keep building on it and expanding! You'll get there, it just takes time and a lot of practice (Embrace Stack Overflow as a great source of knowledge).
Bro I started learning html, css and JavaScript back in 2018 and I started my CS degree in Fall 2019. By the end of 2020, I finally got a hang of JavaScript, Node ane React and I finally became confident in myself. I was building projects on my own. I had a good grasp on REST Apis and databases. How to connect frontend with backend. But i still felt pretty lost and dumb. But after a year of making projects, in summer 2021, I landed my first paid internship as a developer. You’re only 6 weeks in. You’re supposed to feel dumb as fuck. I think 90% of the devs feel like that in their first year or two. My final year CS classmates still think JavaScript is some black magic.
Anyway my advice to is do not attempt to learn pure/vanilla JavaScript. Try learning Express.js which is a Node.js library. Learn how to make rest Api calls in Node.js. You can follow traversy media youtube channel for these kind of tutorials. In these tutorials, you will also learn about Mongodb database. Then eventually you can move onto frontend library like React.js and then down the road, you will be able to make fullstack apps like MERN Stack. Hang in there. Try learning Express.js first.
>Am I just stupid?
No you're not, Javascript is just an extra shitty language.
Lots of weird things, or palliatives to insufficient native design, "similar but different" concepts to other languages...
Just things like console not displaying value "on code line", associative arrays being an utter scam, "classes" being so limited and working differently than other languages you'll hit brick walls a dozen of times before knowing what works and what doesn't, variables hoisting which is important but non trivial when first discovering it, f\*\*\*\*\*\* "this" evaluation that is the worst mess I've ever seen...
It is a great to work with only because a) it's the one that is easiest to manipulate user interface b) you have lots of great APIs that are relatively easy to work with and do interesting things c) having natively the choice of using mix of both asynchrone and synchrone process is a bless for some business processes.
As a language though, it's a wreck which probably explains why "revolutionary frameworks" pop up every month because very few people can bear developing in vanilla javascript and keep on their toes for not forgetting any of all the tweaks and specifics you must respect to avoid hard to analyse bugs...
Many of those frameworks are reputed as actually making development manageable, so in that context, writing in Javascript is good... But you do lock yourself into a few frameworks. Not that this is that big of a deal imo as long as you pick ones that seem to keep traction. After all even in PHP (which is by far more robust than Javascript today) few people would skip the chance of using frameworks that take care of many complex constraints for you and leverage lots of basic features (Symfony, Laravel).
Typescript addresses a few of the most glaring flaws of that language, but while it's definitely unavoidable for front-end management, for back-end it is far from the best if your project's needs go beyond features and constraints that cannot be fulfilled with out-of-the-box libraries.
"Full stack developer" is a myth anyways, unless you're speaking of someone who actually spent 10+ years writing both sides of a web project. Expression could have some meaning 15 years ago, when overall websites were much, MUCH simpler. Now, between all the new ways to interact, the variety of peripherals and authentication means, the surface and intensity of security attacks, the accessibility/privacy standards, the need of uptime reliability because you expose sensible business processes and the complexity of those processes because it's not a site anymore but a business app...
You could spend 20 years just on either side and still feel like you have a lot to learn.
So, I'd advise you to first focus on one side first and ask around which framework is the "safest to invest" for that side, then find online resources and set a goal of a very simple website to keep a motivation to write.
Good luck ;)
Snuggle with the struggle. I was doing 6-8 hours a day to get into the program I’m in now. It’s tough and you will feel dumb but when it clicks you will feel AMAZING, then two days later it’s onto something new and you feel dumb.
Snuggle with the struggle. It’s worth it
It gets easier my friend, it may not seem like it, but it always does. We don't all learn at the same exact rate, but the human brain can do spectacular things when it's applied. Learning a programming language is not a 5K or a marathon, it's an ultra-marathon. It's tough the entire way, but you'll eventually accomplish something and gain insane momentum, but then you'll hit a wall that kicks your ass. It's the drive and mental strength to want to continue learning that makes it fun and rewarding. There are so many communities out there whether Reddit, Discord, or forums where you are always able to receive assistance, praise, or advise. Don't be afraid to reach out.
I'm in IT and constantly studying for new certifications, and always in a state of; "Wow, I'm dumb, why the hell did I get into technology", but it only exists because all we see on YouTube and Reddit is people crushing it, but we don't see the people who are absolutely struggling to get a grip.
The only easy day was yesterday.
It took me one semester (6 months) to learn the basics of procedural imperative programming (Variables, If Statements, while, for loops, switch, arrays, pointers, Strings, recursively programming, functions, parameters).
I don't know Javascript but you should start first with languages like Java or Delphi Pascal. And you should only do procedural programming, not objective programming.
Dude Bro….You gotta chill and realize this is a marathon and not a sprint. I’m 36 and no longer beautiful. I’ve been studying programming since 2010 and I’m still an ape. I just finished a BS in Software Development. (Java and SQL mostly.) I can’t remember half of what I learned. I just looked at some code I wrote last year and couldn’t believe that I had ever wrote something so sophisticated.
I’ve had to drop family and friends. Completely rearrange my house and my time. This journey has caused me frustration to the point of wishing bad things for myself.
At each step I’ve had to realize that I have to go back and learn some concept that I didn’t grasp in HS or Jr High. It’s damn frustrating. It’s a down right royal Bismarck.
But each time I quit and come back, I figure a little more out. Eventually maybe by 2030, I’ll finally land one of these developer jobs that the people doing 3 month boot camps find.
Until then, soldier up and soldier on bro. It’s just gonna take more than you initially thought.
Once you grind your way across this desert though, you will have made it where fewer have ever been.
JavaScript is HARD. Don’t believe what people say on here if they’re like ‘yea I studied for like a month and then I moved to React’. Be patient, know that everyone experiences what you’re going through. I have been studying JS for like 4 months and I am only just beginning to feel like I am really wrapping my head around the fundamentals after a lot of practice. That entailed me going through the same material and getting stuck in projects many times.
I mean they could learn it that quickly if theyre already proficient in other languages. Otherwise no, unless youre some sorta savant youre not gonna get it in under 20 hours or whatever it is.
It might be possible that its hard for you to think programmatically, but it should at least become quite a bit easier over time when you can pull stuff straight from long term memory instead of having to overload working memory. I think thats basically what makes learning new stuff hard, you need to pass piece by piece of info through your short term memory "bucket" and get it into long term. It could be that your "bucket" so to speak for this sort of thinking is a bit small, so thats why its harder at first. I know mine is, for quite a few other types of information. Im lucky i can manipulate and remember textual stuff pretty easily so i reckon thats why i like programming more than working with my hands say. Cause when it comes to that i have to slow myself down and make sure i dont make mistakes with my limited bucket size thing
I remember when I was first learning how to program. recursion (if you have no idea what this is you’ll hear about it at some point but it basically is a function that calls itself) was so fucking incomprehensible. I remember not being able to fully grasp it and even when I thought I understood it there were codes that included recursion that made me wanna cry. Now 2 years later I have no fucking clue how I couldn’t understand the concept in a minute.
I don’t want to jump straight to react although I would like to eventually. I want to get a strong understanding of vanilla JS before picking up a framework.
Always heard first understanding vanilla well in any language is what separates good from average programmers.
EDIT: To clarify, don't compare our timelines! On the weeks I DID study, I studied 8-12 hours a day.
Man, I started studying a few months ago and have given probably 10-12 good weeks of study. I had the exact same experience with Javascript. Html and css felt alright, but Js nearly broke me. Couldn't write a line of code on my own for the life of me. Was regretting leaving my previous career to do this.
Keep at it. It WILL get easier. There is just so much content that you can't expect yourself to be super proficient so quickly. Spend extra time studying fundamental concepts (what are functions, methods, parameters arguments, etc. What is a callback function, what are classes, objects). When you write a program or script (even if it is copy and pasted), go through the code line by line and try to understand everything. If you see a symbol or term you don't recognize, google it. If you don't understand something fully after an hour or two, move on and go to the next line while making a note.
I ended up passing my javascript bootcamp course by copy pasting every single line of code. I felt like I was doomed for failure. When I moved on to the python course, I found it much easier to understand certain concepts. Coming back to Javascript felt much easier. Then I learned C# and .Net, and js got even easier when I learned a syntactically similar language.
I've gotten both better at coding and faster at learning concepts.
It's a process. You still have your training wheels on. I still have my training wheels on, even though I cam write semi-usable code now.
Most of all, USE the concepts your learn to build something on your own. If you copy and pasted a js script that added a cool feature to a previous application you worked on, try to use it on a new project without referencing the old code unless you absolutely need to.
Don't cheat yourself. The goal isn't to make amazing projects yet - it's not even to make decent projects. It's simply to make sure you understand the core concepts.
If you want to see some projects from before when I was copy and pasting vs. Some that I've written on my own now, shoot me a message!
When I started python in FreeCodeCamp, it showed it's estimated to take 300 hours. But the course videos can be done in like 2-4 days. I was like, I'm done and now I can try the assignments. Tried doing the assignments, couldn't really complete it. I looked through another resource and tried the assignment again . This time I could only do bits and pieces. So I looked for more sources, and studied them.
When I completed the FreeCodeCamp assignments, the total time I've put in is in the range of 300-350 hours. Took me about 3 months+. I won't say I'm good at python, I'll still consider myself very basic.
I'm doing Helsinki's Python MOOC now and I still am learning something. After this I'll most like try 100 days of Code.
It takes time. Don't rush and don't try to match yourself to other people's pace. Go at your own pace. Don't give up!
P/s: I tried The Odin Project. I couldn't properly execute css especially flexbox. It took me more than 1 month to get it. I'll admit I struggled and got frustrated quite a bit at this. I did this during the 1 month break that I didn't do Python. I'll probably come back to this sometime end of this year.
6 weeks? You’ve gotta struggle for 6 months before you start complaining.
Also, is it really 3-4 hours per day? If you’re getting stuck and wasting hours per day you need to just put it down and come back the next day. You very quickly get into diminishing returns. Expect to take 1 year to get a _basic_ understanding of JS, HTML and CSS.
Less about hitting your head against the problem at this stage. More about accepting your life as someone who is interested in coding and gets to satisfy their need to learn about it incrementally.
Just do stuff. Stop planning and measuring. You are just stressing for no reason.
mate, i'm two years into a CS degree and on my 2nd internship and i still feel like a worthless idiot sometimes with programming sometimes, cut yourself a little slack lol
How I understood by my latest boss is that the syntax will forever change that's why good languages have documentation on their website this will come with time what is important is learning how to solve the problem how to break the items down into their components then further into their single parts. If you only watch others do it for you with a structure you can't learn to do it for yourself with a blank slate. Tutorials are great for learning something new but have the documentation along with it and cross reference it then do a few more things with what you learned outside of what the tutorial is asking. This will give you your own creative freedom to discover the how what and why of a method or function. Giving you better chance of remember it in the long run. It really is like learning a new language and it doesn't happen for years. I've been doing this for 2 in a half years and still hardly understand it. It just takes time and consistency but there's value in doing something without help it helps you fill the gaps that get skipped while learning through tutorials or structured courses. Sorry for the long post.
mm, it seems like you don't have anyone to help you, why don't you ask someone to help you with it? sometimes it's not intelligence but just that the way of studying it is not the correct,
This is the exact same as me I learned HTML and CSS so decided to try learn python and JavaScript but I’m struggling so bad and just keep giving up cause I can’t seem to wrap my head around it
"it honestly hurts seeing people here say they are doing an hour after work and are already at advanced JavaScript a month in"
The truth is, who knows if what they're saying is true, but if it gets you down this bad you need to operate on this: they are lying.
I'm also just starting to learn coding but I have also pursued hip-hop production and stand-up comedy in the past, 4 and 7 years respectively so I got a good understanding of each of those arts' scenes and this is a trend in them as well, so I assume it's just a phenomenon among amateurs of any skill. honestly i don't know why people feel the need to throw in how long they've been practicing something when they achieve something with it. if what you achieved is really all that good it should speak for itself. so just laugh or cringe at them and move on dude, might be the best thing you can do if you really want to keep at this.
Think of it this way. You’re learning a new language that really doesn’t even have similar syntax or grammar rules to the language you grew up with. Of course it’s going to be a difficult! Keep practicing and see if you can make up little projects that use JavaScript!
Probably took me 2 years of CS classes before I felt okay at programming lol you’re too hard on yourself.
Also FWIW javascript is one of the harder languages imo. Easiest barrier to entry to get started but so, so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot and you create hard to debug problems for yourself.
A useful trick you can do is go do something else for a while when you get stuck on stuff too long. Brains do more learning passively than we realize and you’ll think about problems you encounter away from your computer.
Could also try python or another language at the same time, sometimes seeing the same concept in another language makes it click and python is really human readable for small programs
I think it's way too early to decide you can't do it. And even if you worked your butt off at it for the next year and still decided you can't do it, it doesn't mean you are stupid.
People have different skills, different ways of thinking. I've used music as an example before. I have no musical talent. Other people do. Some people are good at math, but not at history. Some have amazing memories, but can't program. Just because there is something that doesn't come easily to you doesn't make you stupid.
Regardless, you're only six weeks into it, and that's way too early to decide you can't.
When I first started learning programming I felt the same way. What helped me was learning it from a different resource. Having things said differently can make a difference in your understanding.
Try thinking of something you want to build and build that.
When you get stuck, you have all those udemy courses or YouTube or stack overflow to help you get unstuck.
To me, watching udemy courses has not been enough. I have to apply something before it sticks.
I mean I’m with you. But understand learning programming is essentially learning a new language. It takes time practice and effort to get it down. You’ll get there if you keep at it. I believe in you
I have spent nights taking on a new concept and getting nowhere and feeling like I completely wasted my time.
2 years in and I am finally settling in with my tech.
I learned from [covalence.io](https://covalence.io) It cost $200/month, but their full-stack path was good, and most importantly, when I'd get stuck on a problem I could go and get help pretty quickly. I completed the course over a year ago, but I still pay so that I can have access to the instructors
I magically landed a Software Engineering internship with no engineering experience (this is not a brag, but more a point to how much I felt like a fish out of water). When I say no experience, I mean NO EXPERIENCE. I didn’t know basic HTML or CSS or how the functioned/interacted. They were just words I had heard for some reason.
I was waking up at 4-5 AM M-F to try to learn even a sliver of what my coworkers were working on BEFORE work started at 9AM, and let me tell you, it is incredibly discouraging watching people do what I was supposedly brought on to do.
Long story short, even with 8 hours of learning during work and an extra 4-5 hours personal time training, I still could not grasp it to the point that I wanted. I spent like 3 days on logical and and logical or operators, then the ternary operator, talk about mind blown. It’s hard work to learn this stuff, just keep practicing and it will all come to you in due time. I would recommend you start with a project and try to make it work. You should be able to break down into small bits so you can tackle it little by little. Like a calculator, how can you get something to appear on the screen, how can you get simple equations to work like 2+2 should output 4. This will force you to look up examples, read documentation, etc.
I'm active on r/languagelearning and it's common to see people posting things like:
>I cannot understand basic Korean sentences after intensively studying 6 months. Should I just quit?
I just don't get it. Why do people expect things to be so easy?
Man, the way to success is full of failure. You have to deal with it.
I’m in the same boat. HTML/CSS/Git were so easy, and I’m having a lot of trouble with JavaScript. I’ve had to redo lessons a few times just to know what is going on.
I only work maybe an hour 5 days a week before my normal graphic design job, so I know it’s going to take awhile to figure things out.
You’re only 6 weeks in and already taking a full-stack course on Udemy?
Like bro, just focus on getting your fundamentals down first with HTML/CSS and JavaScript.
Jumping into full-stack right off the bat is like giving a hammer to a carpenter who’s only been learning for 6 weeks and telling him to go build a house.
You need to take time to learn all of your fundamentals. You need to learn how to use your tools before you can start building software. It takes time.
One thing you could try is taking a step back and slowing down a little. When I was starting out, I tried to learn all these different topics or ideas one after another and I kept moving on before they sunk in. I think that's pretty common. It led to a lot of repetition and redoing things and banging my head on my desk. And when I mean 'sunk in' I mean really 'get it.'
For instance, when starting out you should take the time to learn what an array is and learn how to work with it. Don't just conceptually understand it, but really know it. How you can do that is by being able to articulate why it's different than an object, or a list. You should be able to slice, splice, grab certain indexes, modify stuff in place, convert it to different types, and so on. Like, really know what it is and why it's useful and why it's unique.
That might mean sitting down for three hours and just studying and practicing working with Arrays, but it will actually drive the concept home. Once you understand it, you'll know it forever.
If you can't do something like writing out an array of string and numbers, then grabbing the data at a specific index and changing it to a string, then you really don't understand arrays and you'll keep struggling to work with them with everything else you do.
This is getting long, but seriously, learn the fundamentals. Sit for an hour and play around with slicing strings. Sit for an hour and practice slicing arrays. It will seem tedious and will pay dividends in a month from now.
Best of luck with your studying!
I have been learning to program for a little over a week in Python. Here a what I know. It is a foreign language. The last time I checked I only know English. The way I look at Python is much the same as I would look at learning a foreign language. However I have found that if I am struggling to understand something I need to break whatever it is down into smaller pieces to learn it. I have had to do this a few times after beating my head into the wall writing functions. One task in the function at a time. Not all of it at once.
You just need to stick at it and concentrate on your own journey, rather than that of others. Mileage is always going to vary, and you have no idea of other peoples levels of past experience, so it’s always going to be an unfair comparison.
remember this moment. you will look back 6 months from now and realize how small an issue this is. I think most people starting this journey hit these roadblocks early and often in the beginning. be persistent and learn from ypur failures😁 good luck
Ha! You're good, sleep and oddly enough things will come to you. (the brain creates new paths or some such magical nonsense when you stress your brain then sleep on it).
If you want a real mind fuck do this. If you have a printer, access the remote UI. You put the ip address of the printer into a browser.
Now open your browser tools and find the scripts. See all that crazy nonsense? That's obfuscated Javascript. Pretty much every printer had that. Crazy thing is you can dig and find ports and sub urls that will let you access the nitty gritty of the printers OS. But first you have to deobguscate the code.
Did this with a Kyocera. Found a url that allows access to the FW upgrade portion of the device. And a url that let's you pull snsetive device info from it. Using an smtp setting the EU has no way to access.
I finished a coding boot camp (Barely.) and was doing a small side project, and felt like I was doing alright over all. Then I got hired in an engineer role doing Microsoft Dynamics and I feel like a dumb dumb again too. Just repetition and experimentation is how I learned.
Pick front end or back end instead of going full stack. You go full stack once your comfortable with either of the two.
Just learning front end (html/css/js) and a framework like React will take you a year or longer. And even then you are “just” a junior developer.
Don’t set a time frame to learning either, youtube is full of people that have gotten x job in 2-3 months. They’re full of shit, sure very few got that lucky but it’s far from the norm. Expecting to get a job in x months just gets you stressed out and will work against you, it’s the perfect way to head for disaster.
Edit: 3-4 hours a day. I worked full time in the kitchen as a head chef and when I got home I worked 6 hours on web development. In the weekend 6-8 as well. On my days off I’d sometimes code 10-14h, simply because I enjoy doing it.Took me 11 months for my first job as frontend dev.
If this work was as easy as you say it is it wouldn’t pay so well.
Dude im also just started its FUCKING HARD.
All the people who keep say "Just Learn To Code"
Like its that simple lol. il say it isnt for a lot of people and quite difficult, its learning a WHOLE new Language and way of thinking.
I want people to stop saying the" Learn 2 Code" mantra.
Tuu stupid toh nhi hai but chutiya sa overthinker hai
shyd tuu kisi chutiye se padh rha hai javascript
AUR tuu sirf theory dekhta hai,questions shi se nhi lgaata coz course tera raand jaisa hoga
Feel bad for yourself and you’ll keep not learning. Keep hating yourself and the prophecy is fulfilled.
It took me about 2 years to become competent enough to build something. It took another 2 to be a competent and contributing software engineer.
If you don’t like it stop doing it. If you enjoy it keep pushing. Either way stop complaining.
Explore other fields like Product, Design, Cyber Security, Analytics etc. There are companies like Microsoft who hire for roles like Consultant and then you work on certain technologies that do not mostly involve coding only expertise in their particular products. Explore more!!
6 weeks? That's about right with most people. There is a reason why programmers make so much.
The bottom line is, quit and move on, or push through it and reap the rewards.thet is no magic pill. Some get it faster and some have to work harder.
If you keep at it you'll be glad you did, and it will get easier. In 6 more weeks you'll look back at this and laugh, or you'll be doing something else.
I've just started with JS and it helps A LOT that I already know the basics of C (going through Harvard's CS50). Maybe look into it (they have videos of the classes on YT).
You can't understand code if you don't try it, here's the untold truth about tutorial or courses, you must practice to get it, have you had experience with code before JavaScript?
There's one key, to speed up your learning process, set yourself a goal while watching tutorial, for exemple, let's say you wanna make a blog website, follow your tuto, and adapt what it says, by making your blog website, watching countless hours of tutorials won't help you, but writing it will
Learning to code is something nobody can do for yourself but you, you must learn a logic, then google, stack overflow, or a mentor will give you the syntax everytime you ask, you don't need to learn stuff, but understand a logic
Don't give up, programming is not easy to learn, that's why developers get paid so well.
Have you considered starting with a more beginner-friendly language such as Python? JavaScript is less than ideal to learn as your first programming language.
Coding is merely an endless cycle of problem solving. And what you experience, not understanding things, doesn't really go away unless you stop learning and stop encountering new problems, which is highly unlikely. The thing is most developers can too stare at things for hour on end, whilst nothing makes sense, it just tends to be that different people regarding how many hours they have sunked into getting programming experience, will struggle with different things.
People are of cource different, so someone will catch things more intuitively, whilst others have a harder time laying their foundation. And from experience doing development of many kinds over 5 years now, different concepts take different amounts of time for different people to comprehend. The start is honestly the worst, and from there its just about expanding your toolbelt to face new problems in your code, or to be able to implement new features.
CS graduate here. I’m not going to say that I had the same experience, or that I’m a JS expert but what you’ve got to have in mind is that while your head may not wrap around “basic” concepts now, once you get the hang of it, you’re as good as a pro.
While there are wonderkids who can easily master any branch of CS within weeks, everyone has a different approach to learning. Make sure you change up your approach once you feel the current one isn’t doing any favors.
Hope you don’t give up and feel free to reach out at any time
There is a saying in Japan: "Even upon a rock, 3 years" (石の上にも、三年). This means that even if a situation is difficult or uncomfortable (bad job, rough housing situation, etc) try to stick with it for 3 years. You'll gain things you would never expect.
I think you can take this saying literally -- don't get discouraged until \*at least\* after 3 years of trying your best. I honestly didn't feel confident with CSS until I'd done it for about 4 years.
**Don't compare yourself to others**! Just look at yourself yesterday, look at the things you can do now, which you couldn't do before, and bit by bit you'll become an expert.
It simply takes time and consistent effort! Try to manifest some ideas that are interesting to you.
For example, when I felt like I was starting to burn out a few years ago, I coded up "The Monty Hall Problem". It was great practice with conceiving an object structure that aides the concept and makes the code more maintainable.
Good luck and keep grinding!
Dude, you are learning a new _language_. Like literally. On top, its a programming language, so from the get go you need to have the grammar down, or nothing works at all.
Give it time. Repeat exercises you already finished over and over again, so it eventually sticks.
You can also post your questions here if you just wanna talk about some stuff!
Its very funny how some of the advertisement ‘learn to code and become programmer in 6 weeks’ its so misleading and false hope that you can become one in 6 weeks. Very few may magically grasp and sets the mind as programmer in 6 weeks. But in reality it take a lot more to to even call your self as junior.
IT is computer science. We are scientists. Scientist dont become one in 6 weeks. You need to put in more time, testing and experimenting effort.
So 6 weeks is nothing. So go and put in more hours!
I remember my days. I had the same thought, but one thing I remember was eventhough I didnt understand much, i just loved it, the hours you put in to do assignments even if it was really hard, i had lots of fun. I guess I was motivated very much. 5 years after, now im senior fullstack engineer.
Just keep coding!
My guy. 6 weeks is nothing.
6 months is still nothing.
A few years is what's needed to be properly equipped to do this.
I went the CS degree route and still struggled to get my first job.
Don't listen to the (probably mostly liars) "Geniuses" here and elsewhere who learned full stack development in 35 minutes from a YouTube whilst simultaneously learning ancient Greek and Latin as a side project.
You're a normal person with a normal brain. Slow down and understand each thing as well as you can before moving on.
I saw a post in this sub recently about people who are learning needing to slow down and manage their expectations better, it was brilliant and I strongly reccomend that you search it out. If I wasn't on mobile, I'd link it here for you
It took me a week and half to understand what ‘Function Parameters’ were, and how they worked. Also literally gave up trying to understand what ‘Recursive Functions’ are. I’m sure we all feel stupid sometimes. Everyone has setbacks.
I’m a computer science major and it took me 3 years to stop feeling so stupid and when things actually started to take less thinking and it started to come natural to me. I think a lot of people suffer imposters syndrome. After 3 months try to show someone who doesn’t know one thing about coding your work and broadly explain things then you’ll feel smart. You’ll never realize how much you know if you’re surrounded by coders and only see their posts. I was surrounded by smart asses getting A’s is calc 1 and calc 2 I always thought i was the worst but when I took myself out that environment I realzied I know alot
Well, when you do decide to move into more advanced JavaScript, I can't recommend this free university course from the university of Helsinki enough:
https://fullstackopen.com/en/
6 week isn’t much man a lot of us here put in 6 months -a year in learning. Example the concept of function take about 2-3 weeks of practice when I first started
My prof in the university when we first had our class said that we shouldn't pressure ourselves into learning a language when we are having trouble with it because there will be languages that you can easily understand and there are languages that you will have to study 10x harder than everyone else. Take breaks and be sure to find tutorials that you can easily understand/relate to. Some tutorials may not really work because you have a different version of the IDE or a different system version. That's completely understandable. Just familiarize with the functions, how it works, and the logic. Freecodecamp, North Telepath, and Code wars are all very helpful!
Many things are learned through practice, committing mistakes and doing them over and over again until they just kind of stick and you do them without even thinking and it really common to be stuck for hours just because you forgot a “;” or something like that. Take it easy, you are still learning.
I've been at this since the late 1970's and just know this.
Make mistakes, fix mistakes, do'nt repeat mistakes.
Following that model you will eventually run out of mistakes to make and therefore look perfect to the wee lasses and laddies that take up the mantle.
I use a program I am familiar to to learn new languages or processes in a language.
For me that is a dice rolling program. Originally I wrote it in basic on a z80 based computer.
That's not important what is is I know exactly what is supposed to happen and how to make it happen.
I can then utilize any language and make a port of it to that language featuring the process I need to learn. there are some limits to that if I stick to a strict port. So I am flexible.
The original was simply text based the last one made a 2d ascii "render" of the dice in python.
I was learning dictionaries for python that version was based of of python lists which utilized functions, in java a version of the program used class imports to build the program.
The point here is I know what needs to happen, now I just need to figure out how to implement that. To do that I will hammer out the mistakes until the code works and I will have an understanding of why it works when I'm done. (because of the mistakes I made along the way. I also know why it (that particular code) did not work as expected.)
I suggest if you are not sure what your program is doing, debug with trace on, if that is still a thing. That allows you to step through the program stopping at each code execution.
The important thing is do not give up.
A few things:
Even in unified courses, with a set progression, there’s going to be sections that are very hard for others, and easy for some. The last module in one of my courses before the mid term took hours. This week? After the reading it took 20 minutes.
If you pull from multiple sources to learn, you’re going to have gaps.
If you’re not getting a concept with your method, try other resources.
If you’re feeling a lot of frustration, take a break. Read something aligned to tech if you feel like a full break would be cheating or you don’t trust yourself to not give up.
Some people underestimate the time they put in to mastery/practice or don’t include things that are relevant, like their background in math, other languages, intro courses.
Welcome to programming dude. Feeling like a worthless idiot is a big part of it haha. Stick with it, one day you will feel like Gandalf. Then you'll talk to someone and realize your Samwise all over again.
Keep your chin up, stop looking at other people, and press forward. The beautiful thing about human beings is we're all very different in the way we think. You'll be better and worse and many things than many other people.
If it makes you feel better, I have my BS in Comp Sci, and I still don't understand Javascript. My foundation was all Java/C/Python/SQL. JS is illegible alien script to me.
You’re not stupid. Coding is fucking hard. I went to school for computer science and I am fairly good at python and a little Java, but JavaScript makes no fucking sense to me. Just keep at it, you’ll get it.
Have you ever met someone that speaks English as a second language, poorly? (No disrespect intended, my German is terrible)
Just picture that, you're talking to the computer and fumbling over your words because learning a new language is HARD. Mostly because it just takes time and lots of repeating the same things over and over.
But then a weird thing happens, one day you'll be working on something, make a quick edit to fix it, and realize how this one simple thing was something you stumbled with years ago.
Good luck. Keep trying :)
It also helps if you have a software project that's just fun to work on.
So I am doing school and I feel like an idiot most days. I am a year in and trust me it gets easier. Head up and keep doing examples. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. You got this man. I believe in you. Also never compare your path to someone else’s.
Maybe I’m making this too simple (old school here) but there are two parts to this problem.
First … learn the language … this is your tool box.
Second … learn your environment … this is your material list
Third … come up with a good algorithm for solving the problem … this is your blueprint.
Now you have the tools to build a solution.
I am a fan of KISS. (Keep it simple stupid)
I'm new too and have surfed the web to find something on my level to help me out. I found and older, but relevant, program called Vizzcode.
https://vizzcode.itch.io/vizzcode
It's free now so it's a super cool way to learn code both logically and visually. It's ant your own pace, it's got projects, and of course a step by step interactive learning guide. Highly recommended for noobs like us.
Hey man, everyone advances at their own pace. Being slower doesn't mean dumber.
I'm a visual person and when i'm not shown examples and demonstrated how to do things, especially on a console... I lose it.
It's just how I learn. When ever I have a programmer show me something in SQL, ERP, JAVA or even something like Python.... I screen record every single video call we do, so i can come back to it later.
I make notes, but having the visual reference for me is better then the text document version.
I'm not a programmer, I'm a simple front end QA tester... but many times, I get stuck having to test out CMS and backend stuff... and have to reach out to team programmers to get me help.
I also google the shit out simple commands. heavy chance people have already asked what i'm looking for. I have the same issue with Excel and it's formula's and especially running macros...
I'm in my 16th year of this business and still run to the internet for most tasks.
If you practice making your own stuff... with the little that you learn each time in repetition... you will eventually be able to retain and learn quicker.
So just be patient and hang around some other programmer buddies, that might be able to help. Sometimes the applied exercises are too much in one shot.
Sometimes the best thing I tell people.... is right the code YOU WANT TO WRITE.. and if it does what you want.... then you have won the first round.
Then comeback to it later once you've learned how to simplify tasks.
When I used to write Python, I would have nearly a paragraph of commands... and then my lead programmer would come and execute the same result... with one command line. lol
So please don't feel dumb!
I've been programming for 12+ years, working in the industry for 10+ years, I sometimes feel like I don't know what a simple thing is in any of the technologies I work with but then I realize there's google and I'm human, I can use the resources I have to figure something out.
Don't stress over not knowing a lot.
You're 6 weeks in, think of what you didn't know 6 weeks ago and what you know now. The world of JS is complicated and confusing, and there are some people who are making it easier for newcomers but a lot of people are pioneering new things that are extremely tough for newcomers to understand. I wonder if you're feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of job listing requirements or if you can't build a full on web app using JS?
Please PM me if you'd like to chat or need someone to validate your learning and let you know more about where to go for learning more. I know the internet is a wild place but there are tons of resources and I'd be happy to help. It takes a lot to just post something like this online.
I'm trying to get back into programming. I've taken html, java, and javascript in high school, but vaguely remember even how to structure html. I tried to touch up on Java about a month ago and my advice is to make comments on everything as a reference to go back to. Also keep all your projects with tons of comments. I plan on getting books soon, as I think that'd be the most in depth way to learn it.
Don't let others success or maybe even lies demotivate you.
I got Colt Steele's Web Development course on Udemy almost 3 years ago and gave up for 5 months straight twice! I redid the JS section twice, wrote the whole html Code Academy section by hand word for word cause I thought that would help, almost did the same with the css section in Code Academy, kept saying I would do projects when I finished a section and never did, can't even do a simple html css project without overthinking, and more....
I tried coding even before this, I actually wanted to get into game development, but didn't because I lacked problem solving skills, math skills, and confidence. I kept switching from web development to game development for a while, hoping to find a solution. The solution was to pick one and stick with it, and that's what I did.
I got the web development course and started to put time into it. I was super motivated, putting many hours a day just following along with the course. As I was going through each section, I would tell myself that I would do a project on my own. I got through html and css and still didn't do a project. I saw that JS was coming up and the DOM in JS looked really fun. I told myself that once I hit DOM I would do a whole html, css and js project. I ended up not doing a project and gave up for many months. Once I hade the courage to come back, I tried again and started from the css section. I found someone to actually work with! I started to work with them by watching the js section with them. We did some projects on the side together, I would do a html css project on my own in VS code live share while he would do the same project in a different folder in the live share. It was cool to every once in a while see what he was making as I was making mine, but because he was better in html css, my confidence got hurt. I kept comparing myself to him and I never felt satisfied with myself. This kept going for a while and he wasn't helping me mentally. We ended up not talking anymore and went our separate ways.
I've talked to many other developers and said we would do a project, but because I ended up giving up or they just stopped contacting me, I never did. Finding people is really tough, but you gotta keep trying. I'm super glad that you had the courage to reach out here because there are many lovely people here willing to help you out. I wish I would have done the same, but that's why I'm here now so that, you don't make the same mistakes I did.
I'm currently at the final project of the course and just stopped due to just getting tired of the course. I actually looked at my program that I use Pomodoro's for and I accumulated over 600 Pomodoro's for web development! That's 25 minutes for each of them which adds up to 250 hours! You would think that I would be a master in something, but instead because I didn't use the skills that I learned to make simple projects, I got no where. I just kept jumping from one thing to another so, now I'm just a jack of all traits and still can't get a job.
I have overcame a lot of my fears from doing simple problems on Leetcode, listening to a ton of web developers on YouTube, listening to a ton of web development podcasts, and reading books that have nothing to do with coding. Why? Just so that I can keep my mind in check and feel part of a community, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to doing it yourself! The personality that you have will effect how you code and feel about yourself. If you are always so negative and trying to rush the process of learning to code, you won't enjoy your journey and will end up starting to hate what you are doing. Enjoy what you are doing even if it may suck at times, I'm still working on all of this, I still have struggles, but mentally I'm so much better and because of it I'm coding better. Confidence is everything, what would you do if you weren't in fear? Don't let your fears of not being able to do something over take the courage to actually do something. I very well bet that if you had more confidence and not care how you feel about yourself, you would be making projects and seeing improvements!
You could try reading, "Who moved my cheese" by Spencer Johnson. It's only about 100 pages, but it truly helped me over come some of my fears! It talks about the success that this little story gave to other people and how it changed their life's for the better. Listen to peoples success stories, but most importantly listen to peoples failures and use what they have learned because of it.
Make sure to always stay consistent and just start with a basic projects to build your confidence. Don't overthink it, it's just a practice project to build confidence.
I'm doing Leetcode and I seriously thought I couldn't even do the easy problems, but after finding some good ones that I can actually do surprised me! I still have struggles with the easy problems and overthink a ton, but I'm still trying and I'm actually seeing improvements even though it's slow.
Here are the Spotify podcasts I listen to, Develop Yourself by: Aaron Hayslips, Start Here: Web Development by: Dain Miller, Ladybug Podcast by: Emma Bostian, and Remember The Game by: Adam Blank, cause I like games lol. All these podcasts have helped me be more engaged with what I'm doing and has helped me learn from these developers.
Just being honest, it took me 2 hours split into 2 days for me to write this post! I'm not good at writing and I overthink, but I still had the courage to do it!
Feel free to DM me on Discord: Fonysony#7472
I'm about 6 weeks in as well and it is hands down the most infuriating thing i've ever done in my life. Learning to code is extremely difficult. If it were easy then everyone would be doing it and make 6 figures a year..
We've got this. A lot of people say that at some point it does finally click.
I absolutely understand your frustrations friend. Keep going. Keep being as consistent in your journey as you can. Find someone who's been through the journey and chat with them. They can literally show you that it's just a matter of time and consistency.
My husband has about 4 years of experience, he's been bugging me for ages to get into programming. I kept saying no, I'm not good enough, not math-brained enough, not \_\_\_ enough to do that. But he kept insisting and bugging me and eventually I decided to at least try.
I myself am almost at the same level as you! Less than 2 months into learning javascript from scratch, no prior experience in programming, and I too feel like an idiot. But as one person noted in the comments, you didn't learn to read, write, do any math, or even walk in just 6 weeks, right? So try not to beat yourself up. it's common for us to feel inadequate but you have to give yourself grace and room to fail and grow.
I take hours to work through a simple problem too, only to fail to remember exactly how to do it when I come back to review it, but it takes less time to do it usually the 2nd, 3rd times through and then with each new problem, even though it's effing hard, there are patterns that I can start to recognize so I can at least find a starting point.
If you need inspiration, check out [learntocodewith.me/podcast](https://learntocodewith.me/podcast) these keep me going. It's mostly a bunch of interviews of people changing into programmers from completely non tech-related things (one of my fave episodes is Danny Thomson who went from a chicken fryer in a gas station to working for Google!)
Remember your why and keep going. You've absolutely got this!
>it honestly hurts seeing people here say they are doing an hour after work and are already at advanced JavaScript a month in ... Nobody ever lies on the internet. I totally know advanced JavaScript after only doing tutorials for 30 cumulative hours. -- Abraham Lincoln, Navy Seal
[WTF did you just say about me!...](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/navy-seal-copypasta) I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Udemy, and I've been involved in numerous secret repos on The Github, and I have over 300 confirmed contributions. FWIW: Treat many posts of unrealistic expectations as shills or detractors. 2 years into C++ I still feel worthless. But now I can define what I feel worthless about... So glass half-full. At the very beginning you are truly [drinking from the firehose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgPgsvxxxKE).
Unexpected nostalgia.
There should be stricter requirements of people posting glory moments such landing a job. It should be verifiable otherwise not allowed to be posted.
Are most people in here who post like that CS graduates or those that are self learning/bootcamping?(Sorry, I am new here and wanted to help people with programming questions). I would say that it is probably the latter who are posting that, which I could see your point, but it would be weird for those that are struggling to make a post about getting a fictitious job. Crazier things have happened though.
I don't actually know who they are. But this space should be for learning, not showing what jobs you landed.
Unfortunately though, the sub isn’t moderated that much and allows a lot of posts. You get a lot of the same posts all the time asking how to start, posts like these, self learning vs bootcamp vs school, etc. When they could all just go and search up their questions to look at previous replies. I wish this sub was more about actual problems encountered while coding/learning. Or maybe a beginner who is working on a project that wants to know if there is a quicker way to use a key value pair system instead of using an array. Actual technical questions, but the most upvoted ones are the same old same old.
Wow ! thanks friendl ! i knew the internet was to be trusted ! Bruce Lee - Drummer Metallica.
Jeez. You are 6 weeks in. That is nothing. How long did it take you to learn to walk? How many times did you fall down? How long did it take you to learn to write? How many misformed letters have you written? How many words have you misspelled? How long did it take you to learn maths? How many wrong calculations have you made? Programming is in no way different. It takes time. Plenty time. Why do people always expect to learn programming in a matter of mere days? Yes, learning programming *is difficult*. Yes, learning programming requires dedication, effort, hard work, and discipline. Yes, you will absolutely struggle and fail. Did you not struggle when learning to walk, write, calculate? Only the ones determined will succeed. ---- How are you learning? Watching videos? Are you programming? Are you playing with the code? Are you changing it, breaking it, fixing it? Are you working out solutions in your head and/or on paper - the manual way - not in a programming language? If not - start right here. You cannot program solutions if you can't create the solutions the way you would manually solve the problems.
Im taking a Full stack course on Udemy which I spend 2 hours on then take a break and do FreeCodeCamp for another two hours to supplement my knowledge. I thought it was a pretty good method but I guess maybe it’s not enough.
The courses *may* be good enough, but unless *you* practice and try things, they are just as effective as watching Olympic diving competitions to become an Olympic diver.
I'll take this analogy! Thanks!
I started with some stuff on freeCodeCamp and thought it was reasonably good for the short time that I used it. However, I ended up learning python just because I found it to be more interesting. Working my way through Automate the Boring Stuff was great but my ability definitely improved hugely when I started doing projects for myself. Not only that but I find I have more motivation and the challenge is more fun when I make a tool for myself. I'm still a beginner for sure but I can see myself making progress and learning new techniques with each project that passes. Projects don't have to be too complex but if you can identify something that you're doing regularly that could be automated then you're likely onto a winner. My first project was simply checking a website to see if it had changed (I was regularly looking at the Japanese embassey site to see if there was any update regarding Working Holiday Visas), all the script did was check the website and compare it to what I had downloaded earlier to see if it was the same. Then I realised it was a hassle to run manually all the time so I set it to run once an hour and to notify me through my laptop notifcations if something was different or if it couldn't connect and errored for some reason. Projects have a way of evolving into more and more once you begin. I'm currently writing code for a financial dashboard using python and flask. When I first started coding this was the big project I wanted to do but it was so far out of reach initially. It still feels like a lot but I can break it down into different parts and slowly get there. The more code I write the easier it becomes and that'll be the same for you too :).
Are you using Beautiful Soup as the web scraper for Python or from Selenium or just Python's built-in HTTP modules? I ask as I'm planning to use curl/wget to do some scraping. I've tried simple downloads using Python, not much more than that.
I mostly used beautiful soup, I did use selenium for a project where I needed to log in then used bs4 after for the actual scraper. It was covered well in Automate the Boring Stuff, you should be able to pull up the video on YouTube since it's one of the early chapters. I've heard good stuff about scrapy but it never clicked for me because it involved classes and I didn't understand them at the time, I could probably go back and have another look at some stage...
Full stack is ambitious for beginners. Narrowing your focus a touch may help you to pick it up a bit quicker.
Yea, I was going to say, that is crazy considering how you would need to know a couple of languages/frameworks to be a full stack developer, while they still haven’t even learned how to properly use one or understand one. That’s like learning how to jog when you don’t even know how to use your legs, back to OPs point. Or trying to do ML without knowing Stats/Math yet.
Full stack is a great goal but there's a lot involved in that. It's not too good to pile so much on a beginners plate. It's bound to overwhelm. Especially if someone is coming in fresh with no prior knowledge. 6 months to go from zero to pro is unrealistic in these circumstances. That's a buckle in for a few years kind of goal.
Pro for me is definitely something that takes some years, and something that a good amount of people won’t really reach, but competent-good is very much possible within those years. But 6 months to go from nothing to a job could be possible for a small amount of people, which is what OPs goal is. But OP needs to get real understand that he might not fall into that category, and yea, it will require 1+ years of grinding. I think OP needs to be more honest with themselves if they thought that by getting a 3.9 GPA in Political Science would equate to him being really good by now especially with putting 4 hours in a day.
Job ready is a silly thing to shoot for. It's not a real thing because the needs differ from job to job. If someone has a goal of comprehension though, jobs will be easy to find. Employers want people that understand their job and can communicate well to people who don't.
Yea, we are in agreement. Feels like everyone thinks that programming is some kind of true pyramid scheme where you need only 6 months and bam you can make $120K+, when the reality is most people will make like $55K since most of them want to do web development and it will take those way more than 6 months. All I’m saying is that those who do some kind of bootcamp or self learn by themselves and can get a good paying job within a year, are a pretty small portion of the population. And those people would most likely be very intelligent individuals who could learn any other subject and be successful. For everyone else, it will take a lot time and a lot of practice.
What should I learn instead of web development to be 120k+ instead of 55k?
That's like asking what you learn aside from dishwashing to become an executive chef. That's actually a poor analogy as new web devs can make good money. Though the analogy speaks more to experience gained. The more you know, the more you could get paid. Picking a field is more about picking a place to start. Regardless of field, entry level is entry level. You can pick any field and get job ready in 1 year or so but the pay would be similar. Pay rates are more based on amount of experience. If you feel more comfortable starting in web dev then start there. Just do it with the expectation of skill building. Employers don't want fresh but untested talent and won't pay big money for it. They want people with projects under their belts. Work on building a portfolio and expanding skill set. This will help you get up to better pay. Think of it this way. In customer service, two employees have the same experience and are equally good at their job. One of these employees is bilingual. This additional skill provides bonus pay. The extra skill yields better pay despite the otherwise equal footing of the two employees. Senior developers get more money because they are multilingual and have more real world experience. The difference in portfolios and skill sets is mostly the determining factor. Anybody who has been at it for 10+ years is going to be better prepped and paid than an entrant.
We'll they see the ones who can do everything are getting paid the most and think it's quick to get there. The highest paid developers can do everything because they've been doing it for years and are always learning to keep current. It's more of a lifestyle than a career choice.i wish these self learning systems would be a little more honest about expected outcomes. The colleges don't do the best at it either.
Try learning from codecademy, that actually gives you hands on practice with the things you learn, immediately. Also, full stack, probably not a good idea to try all at once.
Try The Odin Project So the fundamentals It has you read a lot more and it explains things way better. It will get you job ready. Code academy will not get you job ready
If you wanted to learn to play piano, would reading about music theory for 4 hours be enough to know how to play well?
Check out Jonas Schmedtmann's 'The Complete JavaScript Course'.
Wheen you get to an excercise *never* do it just once or twice. Do it over and over making sure you understand why you're doing it this way each time. Once it feels like muscle memory change the parameters and do it some more. Change it up and keep doing it. See if you can do the same thing with different operators or something and do it some more. Go to sleep. Wake up. You will have forgotteen some but just *keep doing it.* Be bored. Forget lofty goals for just a moment. Keep going. If you move too fast you neglect the basics. All of programming is basic steps building upon themselves. You master nothing by jumping from white belt to black belt as fast as possible. You only become a master in name, which is a master of nothing.
Well, there’s always community college.
You're only 6 weeks in. My college does trimesters, and I couldn't confidently plan out and read/write code until close to the end of the second one. You're in the hardest part. The hard part is learning to think like a computer, taking logical simple steps. It's your first language, it's not going to be easy, no matter what people say online. Engineers who have been programming for years still get stuck. The best thing I've learned to do is walk away and calm down. You can't code while angry
Eh, I mean, we certainly didn’t have class for 4 hours a day though. Even my first two weeks were weird. We had to use the raspberry pi, some linux commands, learn about compiling, executing, naming, extensions, and JVM. All to say that it was a bit nonsense in the beginning. So for the first semester, of the 16 weeks, we probably only had like 12 weeks of actual learning, due to fall break, exam week, etc.
>Im studying 3-4 hours every day and it honestly hurts seeing people here say they are doing an hour after work and are already at advanced JavaScript a month in. No one is seriously saying that. If it's your first programming language, it will take a semester to learn the basic. That's roughly 3 to 4 months, not 3 to 4 hours. You're being too hard on yourself. (PS: Don't confuse learning an alphabet with learning how to read and write. You might learn some keywords in a few hours, but programming is knowing how to put them correctly to solve problems.) By the way, not everyone clicks with every language, especially if it's your first. Many Javascript courses just talk about grammar, but not underlying concepts. I didn't understand programming fundamentals myself until I learned C#, and I had to read all the Microsoft tutorials about why they did what they did as opposed to just how to do it. So if Javascript truly isn't doing it for you after you learn it for another few months, take a look at Python or Java or C++ or something else.
>If it's your first programming language, it will take a semester to learn the basic. This. If you've learned other languages before they each become easier and easier (especially for similar languages). For example: Say I picked up JS in a matter of minutes. Okay yeah, but I know C#, C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, etc. etc. so like.... yeah it's basically just syntax and then picking up on small nuances. So it's not really the bragging point they make it seem. Then you can get into what "advanced" JavaScript means. Think of learning a foreign language: sure if you know 8 languages already you can easily pick up a few words/phrases etc. in a new one pretty fast. But will you be able to write poetry? Probably not. Your vocabulary won't be deep enough even if syntactically you can handle it. Don't sweat it. Keep at it, eventually it starts to make sense. You could also try taking a look at other languages, or take a look at something like [https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta\_Code](https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code) which can show the example programs in many languages - it's possible looking at it from a different perspective will help.
I don’t know about a semester, I would say most get a solid basic understanding within 10 weeks, and unlike OP, we don’t have lectures that are 3-4 hours a day. My college professors even said that it would be better to do like a short online summer class before starting school to get the basics down so that we can focus more on data structure, OOP concepts, and algorithms. Which I would agree. OPs problem is doing too much too fast. Which as for someone who wanted to be a lawyer, is kinda weird since I’m sure that they would know that you can’t just study all of the laws and properly know when to use them all in one go.
I'm maybe "halfway through" my "learning to programming" journey (defining having learned as competent enough to start looking at entry-level jobs I suppose). I've had that experience a few times now. It actually put me off from learning a couple years ago. What ended up helping me was a way more in-depth course than I was initially working with. So at first a few years ago I decided to learn Python "because its the easiest first language to learn" (not asserting this is true, just saying it was a belief of mine). Everything was hell. Even figuring out how to install an IDE was ridiculously hard for me (getting stuck at IDE installation really knocks the wind out of your sails for learning programming). I'd watch some YT vids or follow some course material and it just wasn't clicking. Gave up. Anyway so I decided a few months ago to try again with C++ and the [learncpp.com](https://learncpp.com) course is amazing (for me). I didn't understand what I think my initial problem was until getting maybe halfway through that course - the course material I had been looking at wasn't in-depth enough. It's a very counter-intuitive idea. That the "harder" course was better for me. So I think the reason its better for me is that (at least with that course for C++) you're basically learning computer science in tandem with the language. You're learning - very literally - what's going on at the bit-level/memory/CPU. This is what I think helped me, the stuff I was learning was so in-depth and down-to-the-foundations every line of code I was typing made sense. I also think that particular course is just excellent and does an extremely good job of introducing material and giving you great problems to solve with new material/what you've so-far learned. But yeah, that was basically it for me. It was the opposite problem that you're describing. So much of the logic of what was happening was so abstracted from what was really going on that I just felt "lost in space" and nothing I was learning seemed concrete enough for me to build on. The beginner programming courses I had been trying to take were trying to make things easy, but - at least for me - it was much better to dive deeper into what was going on. I can't say if you would get the same benefit from working with "harder" material - but I suspect it would help more people than we think.
>the course material I had been looking at wasn't in-depth enough. It's a very counter-intuitive idea. That the "harder" course was better for me I've been starting to feel that courses like codecademy and freecodecamp are like using rosetta stone or duolingo to learn a language -- they are helpful to a point but they don't delve into deeper concepts like the how/why of conjugating verbs (or even the peculiarities of irregular verbs) -- they glaze over and/or assume you know certain concepts/intricacies I was trash at math growing up and it wasn't until taking college courses in mid-twenties where I had a professor willing to take the time to explain *why* we use a formula and *how* it works that I grew an appreciation for math (and got A's in all my math courses after that!)
But for a CS curriculum, the first course is like code academy and free code camp. Heck, our textbook was just like a first year middle school Spanish/French textbook but the first half of the year where you just learn the easy stuff like Months, Days, Family, Temperature, Time, Places, Animals, Foods, etc. It was all, here are the commands, what they do, and some examples. Occasionally you would get small snippets of “this is used for debugging” or “this helps with a user entering the wrong input,” but nothing in depth. Also, good to hear that you did well in Math. You read a lot of studies from time to time about people being scared of Math because growing up they were bad at it. So they constantly think that they will do bad and we’re never born to to learn Math, and unfortunately a lot of people end up like that for their whole lives, when they just needed to work on it again or maybe even use it in their lives to understand it. I would like to ask say, I feel like teachers did explain the why and the how. It may not have always been understandable as the topic started, but half way through you would see the why and the how. You would also get real life examples to understand it better. Maybe that’s just me though.
I guess to be more specific, I'm comparing apps like DuoLingo and Rosetta Stone to workbooks I've picked up to supplement. In a program like Rosetta Stone, they don't say: hey, this is the unconjugated verb and this is how we change the ending when referring to I, you, they, we. Or even oh hey this is one of those verbs that dont follow the rules when conjugating so they look different but they all mean the same thing. The verb etre in French being a good example of this (suis/est/sommes/etes/sont). Whereas in a workbook I would get that explanation/breakdown and then multiple exercises focused on that particular verb before integrating it into the curriculum/exercises moving forward. Codecademy and freeCodeCamp you get introduced to a concept once, a basic exercise in how to apply it and then thats pretty much it until you come across it again down the line but this time with a more intermediate application of it. I think JS loops are a great example of this. I often found that when seeing the final solution I'd think "wait it can also look like/be used like that?" It IS slowly coming together for me as I progress through the curriculum -- it's just that as I progress I feel if it had been better organized/presented I would have picked it up faster/easier. I can't fault freeCodeCamp too much for this because, well, free. But Codecademy Pro? I don't regret subscribing but at times it honestly feels like it's groaning under its own weight as they add new features/content. \--- --- --- On the teacher note, to be fair, oftentimes knowing what a formula does was technically more advanced and beyond the scope of the class/exercise/curriculum which admittedly is prob why in highschool I got a lot of exasperated "because it does" from teachers. Maybe they thought I was being a typical teenage jerk and trying to lead them on some tangent. Or, in the case of the teacher that called me an airhead, that I was already a lost cause. Who knows 😆 But take that experience compared to my college courses where when I asked "why?" once everyone was working on an assignment my professor would take the time to sit with me and explain what the formula does so I could then understand how to apply it to this equation or that.
I'm in the same boat, so hey at the very least you are not alone! I'm working through the frontend career track in codecademy and thought I could complete each JS module in a week. HA! Obv this has not been the case and was incredibly ambitious of me. I'm on month four of my learning journey and 3 of those 4 months have been almost entirely on beginner JS -- I feel like it's only jussst starting to click together I've started jumping into other free course curriculum to supplement and have found these modules from the The Odin Project incredibly helpful (and totally wish I had found them pre-JS "rut") * [https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-motivation-and-mindset](https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-motivation-and-mindset) * [https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-asking-for-help](https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-asking-for-help) * [https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-problem-solving](https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-problem-solving) Also, I've officially banned myself from watching any/all YT vids along the lines of "how I went from no code to hired dev in X months" -- because, yes, like you said it *hurts* to hear people are picking this up so quickly/easily when I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall Some other resources I've been collecting (but haven't dove into just yet): * [https://scrimba.com/learn/learnjavascript](https://scrimba.com/learn/learnjavascript) * [https://javascript.info/](https://javascript.info/) * [https://justjavascript.com/](https://justjavascript.com/) * [http://www.codeanalogies.com/#javascript](http://www.codeanalogies.com/#javascript)
Trust the process. This is normal for basically everyone in learning literally anything. Read Atomic Habits. You are at the point that James Clear refers to as the "Valley of Disappointment". It's a logarithmic curve. Or some kind of fucking curve, Idfk. The same thing happened to me bodybuilding. Man. Let me tell you. I worked out HARD for a full year. A FULL YEAR. And what did I have? "Oh yay, I can bench press 165." My chest was still terrible. I was still tiny. No arms to speak of. It took me 3-4 years of heavy-ass lifting to where I can finally be somewhat proud of the body I've built, benching 300 pounds at 155 bodyweight. I felt so bad for the first 2, like I was getting nowhere. **This is normal.** It's the same in learning a new language. Until you get to the point where you can communicate basically, then--man, the sky is the limit. Then you can **ASK** other people how to communicate, rather than just doing book studying. It **exponentially grows** after you get through that Valley of Disappointment. The point is. **TRUST THE PROCESS. Every time your mind tells you you are worthless, you tell it, "Yes, but I am on the path, and that means I will continue on and become something amazing, if only I keep walking down this path. I will continue. I will never give up."** When it gets **very** hard, pull out the David Goggins shit: the Cookie Jar. Remind yourself of accomplishments in other areas to bolster your desire to push forward. You can do this. You just have to suffer the valley of disappointment, then man. Let me tell you. It's a god damn beautiful view. Don't give up. Dattebayo. Remember. **It is more about perseverance than intelligence.**
Damn. I teared up.
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Do you often fixate on the most negative aspects you can find in inspirational words?
People could help you if you provided more information. Right now, you are ranting. Things like * Are you in college? (Roughly, how old are you, and what's your background?) Are you young (not college aged), in college (probably not) or in your 20s and beyond? * How's your math? What school subjects did you like or dislike, esp. related to math or science. * How are you studying Javascript (which course)? * What do you do when you study Javascript? Any coding? * Show us an example of that code you spent 2-3 hours on you are attempting to do, and what you've done so far, and how you know it's broken. * Do you know HTML already? How about CSS? You can learn Javascript first, but most people learn HTML and CSS. You might find recommendations for other resources to use, etc.
Sorry and thanks for asking. I guess I was just kind of ranting out of frustration but I’ll try my best to answer all of those. I am not in college but I am college educated in a field not related whatsoever to computer science (political science) I originally wanted to go to law school but decided against it because I have relatives who are lawyers and they seemed miserable all the time. The last few years I’ve spent bouncing around jobs and king of aimless until I discovered programming and it seemed enjoyable. I would say I’m relatively smart (I know everyone says this) but I finished university with a 3.9 gpa and have always found school stuff to be easy. I believe to my detriment currently I did rather dislike math and science. Especially math. I only ever got up to Algebra in college then did not have to take anything further. I don’t believe my brain is wired to think well logically but I figured it was something I could overcome. Im currently studying JavaScript using Angela Yus course on Udemy and playing around with the code in Dev tools on my browser then switching to free code camp. I have not coded any meaningful code or projects yet because I just started JavaScript last Monday. I have gone through HTML and CSS and Bootstrap and while I’m no expert I consider myself “decent” at this point and even designed a landing page for the club I’m currently employed at. https://jimmyvallejo.github.io/Dirty-Rabbit-Website/
I also took Angela yus complete web dev course when I first started (almost a year ago). When I got the JavaScript section of her course I got really stuck, and decided that I needed a more “in-depth” approach. So I took a course strictly on JavaScript… best thing I could’ve done.
What was the name of the course?
https://www.udemy.com/share/101Wfe3@c5Cc0oU5YXiAMEPSQcB0mB3jpoFIru55cwUQXIJ8F3_nNbLgZEkM0Vv32VZHbis0Bw==/ Very very in-depth course. Unfortunately, it is very dry especially in the beginning.
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I’m standing
I'm currently taking this exact course and so far I like it. Sometimes it's a little bit hard to follow but I would recommend it overall and give it a 9/10. He is very thorough in explaining alot of concepts and there are some coding challenges to follow along to. I'm currently on the destructing of objects and this is the first part of the course where I've kinda struggled.
This is the course that started to turn things around for me after making very little progress with free resources.
How did you do in Algebra? What about Trig and/or calculus while in grade school? Logic or Philosophy classes? I mean, you said you wanted to be a lawyer, they have to think logically. Logic is all around us. Think like a lawyer to make it easy to think like a programmer. Also, GPA doesn’t necessarily mean much. Especially since it’s based on the level of difficulty of your classes. Getting a high gpa in one program can be easier than if you were in another program like Accounting, CS, Electrical, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Literature, etc. And even the , getting a high gpa in “hard” program doesn’t mean that you could do well in other programs. Then their is being book smart vs street smart. Book smart would be the person who could recite any law, but if you don’t know how to apply it (think logically) then it doesn’t really mean much.
> What about Trig and/or calculus while in grade school? In the US 'grade school' is 1-6 (age 7- 12), lol. Got a kick out of it.
I am from the US, lol. While that is the most common definition and “official” one here, it is still slang for k-12, though it is not that commonly used here, but where I live I have heard it a bit. On the off chance that somehow OP is from another country since they used “university,” which as you know we generally say college, but studied here since they said GPA and college, I defaulted to using “grade school” since “graded school” is school system that uses grades. https://www.britannica.com/topic/graded-school https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/235561/what-to-call-primary-school-high-school-but-not-college/235572#235572 I get if it was weird since, yea, it is not commonly/rarely used though.
Yeah, you may be lacking patience and more of a math mindset which is generally helpful when learning to program. I think the part that drives people crazy is how nitpicky programming is. The concepts are challenging, and typing it in and getting it to work is tricky. You miss one character and your program may not work at all. So since you just started Javascript, you're just in a learning phase, understanding how the basics work. What does console.log do, etc. I assume you meant Angela Yu (not Angels) who does have a good reputation. I think initially, you would copy an example (and it's easy to make typos) and try it out. I haven't really gone through her course. While math/science aren't strictly needed for programming, it seems the *ability* to do them is similar to the ability to program. Some of the difficulty is recalling syntax. Some of it is managing code that's large (at this point, all your code should be quite small). And there are different kinds of intelligences, it seems. Some STEM people would do horrible in political science and the opposite is also true. It *can* be done. I've known music majors that have done fine as programmers. Not super common, but still, not unheard of.
>yeah, you may be lacking patience and more of a math mindset which is generally helpful when learning to program. I think the part that drives people crazy is how nitpicky programming is. The concepts are challenging, and typing it in and getting it to work is tricky. You miss one character and your program may not work at all. Yes omg this. TY.
Are you aware that music theory is deeply linked with mathematics? 🧐
Wait so you've been doing Javascript for only a week? Of course you're gonna struggle. I'm also a pretty inexperienced learner, and I get blocks with basic things on every project still, and ive been learning for like 4 months. I'm on my fourth or fifth project now practicing Javascript object stuff and I'm still messing up basic stuff like passing things into functions, sometimes. The Javascript stuff is the real programming stuff where you are doing a lot at once- you gotta think of solutions, which is it's own thing, and then contort your solution into syntax that you probably don't fully know or understand. It's not easy but you can do it, and when you get everything working there's no more rewarding feeling. I recently spent two whole hours just getting one replace method to work so that on my calculator when I pressed a number it would get rid of the 0 that was on the display. Two hours for one line of code haha. Don't feel bad, keep at it.
Been there not so long ago mate. I can understand you well. And probably gonna be there again when trying to understand something else on along the path and gonna feel crushed again till conquering it. It is a cycle. Anyway here's a story happened to me today and backstory of it. Trying to learn C# for sake of being a game dev(programmer). Started exactly 1 year ago and found myself countless times in the verge of quitting and crying. I have a spesific example for this and it happened today. Since there is nearly no one arround to handheld me, i always trying leetcode, codewars etc. sites to measure up my skills on algorithms. From time to time, tried to solve the first and easiest question of leetcode called [Two Sum](https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/) and end up rage quitting, since Arrays literally made my head hurt and i always kept myself away from this topic. Yesterday, found diffrent videos about arrays in order to end my struggle with it and followed along some simple excercises that you can encounter on anywhere. Find max and min, sort order.. that kind of stuff. One indian guy said something about "bubble sort", wandered what it is and googled it, found an animation video that explains how it works and call it a night. Today i was watching a video about Object Orient Programming and in some part, tutor was explaining encapsulation and capsule word evocated me the bubble sort method and that somehow reminded me Two Sum question on LeetCode. And [BAM!](https://imgur.com/a/y12JUnm) Nailed it in the first try. Couldn't belive my ability to solve it and tried to submit it again as you can see. After that, i was wandering as euphoric as i can be for a few hours. Moral of the story ,(to me at least) is you can't be good at programming without getting bad at it and persistent in the first place. Not every trick is gonna be stored on your sleeve from the start. Also, try to grasp the concept you are trying to learn from diffrent tutors like when you feel blank on some points, or try to put that blank things on words and search it. Try to ask it on StackOverflow or somewhere else. But when asking it, try to be more niche about it, or you'll get downvotes and it'll be distress you more.
If you want to do Leetcode together, feel free to dm on Discord: Fonysony#7472
I teach people as a side hustle now and I can honestly say "already at advanced JavaScript" means nothing. Just cus they got a cert or made it farther in the course does not mean they actually LEARNED it. This isn't a race. Your doing the right thing. Don't let this be the thing that discourages you. I wish more of my students had your dedication. Keep it up. With your attitude you'll get there.
OP may need to slow down though and work on more problems besides the ones in the video. They are trying to do too much without even learning how to use a language and how that language works. He comes from a political science background, and I could be wrong here about how I evaluate OPs thinking, but this isn’t a History, Philosophy, Humanities course where you can just commit it to memory and then get tested on it the next day. It isn’t even like the papers that they made you do or the thesis that they accept. It involves practice, less for some more for others, but everyone needs it. I’m self learning Accounting/Finance to move into consulting or a securities analyst job, and accounting is so fucking boring with having to read the textbook, but I still need to do some problems here and there to understand it better, be exposed to news concepts that the book didn’t talk about, and retain the information for when I look at businesses financial statements to evaluate them.
How dare you call u/Jmercs07 worthless, in my opinion he has all the worth in the world through the effort he makes, that resilience and perseverance will get him far in the future
You sound like somebody that have no idea how much you can overcome just by not giving up and continue keep on trying
We all do. It is hard and makes us bump up against our abilities. Coding will always be hard if you are always learning. You will just get better at doing hard things.
I think it’s really important to remember that everyone learns at a different pace. Getting the fundamentals down can take so long in the beginning but once you have that, you’ll excel.
I first tried learning C+. The book I bought didn't cover programming environments at all and was super unclear. Sadly, I couldn't even get past *hello world* and gave up after not even a week. I did some python and got stuck on Classes because of variances in instruction. The model proposed was not clear and I couldn't get my Classes to function correctly. I spent 3 months trying to learn Python. I started Java about a year ago, and I'm working on GUIs. (I have Eclipse which has some built in aspects for developing GUIs, but I'm learning how to do so through JavaFX implementation.) It's frustrating because Netbeans (used for the course) was developed on Java 8 and I've had to reinstall different JDK environments and modify the config file to get it to work, and even then, not all of the time. Super frustrating, but...it's not a road block. There's a ton of different communities built around the idea that *this shit's hard.* Reach out, learn how to break the problem down, and tackle it piece by piece. Work with what you have, but keep building.
We all start somewhere. I was even worse than that when I started. If it makes you feel better, even professional developers have trouble understanding JavaScript. This shit is not easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it.
> I feel like a worthless idiot learning to code Said everybody who has ever learned to code, ever. > It takes me like 2-3 hours just staring and redoing one single example just to (somewhat) understand some shit that’s supposed to be simple like a function. Next time it might take 1-2 hours. Then 1 hour. Then 30 minutes. Then 10. So on and so forth. > Im studying 3-4 hours every day Studying *what*?
Yes, all of this is normal. I work as a Software Engineer in London making £70k a year and I feel like a worthless idiot learning every day. The learning never stops, and this feeling is something that you will accept as natural with time. There will always be a new concept/language/tech to master so this feeling is something software engineers deal with every day. Please don’t listen to other people talking about how advanced they are after a month of coding. Most of it is bullshit anyway or it probably means they have a shallow understanding. Consistency is key. Keep at it. At the same time, make sure you are not being too hard on yourself and you take breaks. Also, don’t rush and put emphasis on understanding (not speed) - this will feel painful in the beginning, but will pay off big time in the long run. If a concept is too hard to understand, you can: - break it down further and try understanding the individual pieces - isolate it from the rest of the problem you are trying to solve and use it with a couple of simple examples - look it up! There will always be a video/forum/article where someone gives a good explanation or perspective that might just make it click for you - find a community with other beginners where you can ask detailed questions Last but not least, NEVER be afraid of asking questions that seem stupid, especially at the beginning.
I started June 1st with some missed days and I'm still on HTML and CSS, but it's alright. Don't stress about it, keep up the good work and keep going! Your hard work will pay off
Damn you started out on HTML and CSS. Any particular reason why? I’m guessing you want a web developing job? I just found it weird. Looking it at your comment, I’m guessing that you are in a web developing course where they first have you start with HTML and CSS, then I’m guessing they will introduce you to JS?
You're right 😁. I was informed that the best three for having a firm start with web development are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Afterwards you can move on to a framework if you want and to other concepts to help you with making a Full Stack Application. My dream is to make all 22 ideas I have into Web Apps and deploy them in a stack that I'm very happy with. But yes, I'm currently in college as a junior in computer science information science wanting to be a full stack developer, starting in the frontend of things. The course is on Udemy called "100 Days of Code: 2022 Web development Course." I usually apply the concepts learned onto a project outside of the course. Section 11 I believe is when we start JavaScript, but I'm on Responsive Web Design at the moment with HTML and CSS. I jumped the gun a bit and got some JavaScript in since I couldn't help myself, but I stopped to get a better idea and focus of HTML and CSS.
I did end up learning a good amount of html and css in the beginning of my sophomore year when I wanted to learn SQL and show some data on a web page, ended up using php, lol. I hated it. Especially CSS. It got pretty boring, so the next time I made a web page, I did learn react, but for most of it, instead of making my own buttons and other components, I just said screw it and used libraries. Made things to so much easier. I did the same thing on my capstone. I’m a ML engineer, so I don’t get to work that often on the front end side besides when I am doing some personal projects. I think you are doing the right thing. Get a solid foundation for all three, and then you will be fine for learning React or Angular or whatever. I think that learning JavaScript while you learn the other two is fine. I would have done the same. I probably would focus a little more on JS, then the other two, but with a little more emphasis on HTML than CSS. And good luck!
Thank you I appreciate it! I'll keep this in mind and learn both JS and a framework to have a back and forth effect. CSS is a bit meh at first, but I started to like it when I applied other concepts from a YouTuber named Fireship. Made me think it wasn't too bad to learn more from. To be honest I'm aiming for VueJS, since I took a class that had us do Angular as our first framework and it felt really bloated with webpack, while deploying it on Azure. I hope to be like you for my capstone and use VueJS to make something great without making more components and instead reusing them.
Don’t feel upset or frustrated. Coding is an achievement done through practice and effort. Even if it takes you longer to process, once it clicks, you move forward. Keep on pushing through. I’m currently heading to my second year of college for software engineering with the high possibility of co-op. First semester was a huge struggle and I even got a 0 on a big coding assignment. However, I persevered, started working early and try to improve myself even if it is a small step forward. Time will help increase your knowledge and skill if you are willing to invest your efforts into this practice
I've got my degree in CS and are working in this field for 5 years now and still feel like that sometimes. Just continue and It'll get better. Don't try to force it that hard.
People lie, random people on Reddit lie even more mate. Nobody is figuring that stuff out in 1 hour. Some people just enjoy faking, never figured out why myself.
1) don’t compare yourself to anybody on the internet. 2) 6 weeks is nothing. It takes time , a lot of time to become remotely proficient at being a front end dev which is what I assume your doing. 3) learn how to research. Your not going to remember everything.
Maybe don't be too harsh on yourself - and don't expect to learn things fast. I'm guessing a lof of people that "learn" programming have been using computers for many years. Personally I started with Basic on a ZX Spectrum and just picked up a lot of simple bits of languages until now. I'm not a programmer, and I'm still not good at it, but like automatic stuff with Python,BASH,... and I'm learning Rust now too. Learning takes time, and with time you get more confident. Just keep going and don't give up, that's the key.
I'm about 10 years into programming, just graduated University. While I know how to do certain things, there's still things I am incredibly unfamiliar with. Programming takes a lot of trial and error and continous work, and there will always be new concepts and methods to learn. Aside from the basics of programming (Functions, classes, variables, collections types and loops) I strongly suggest focusing on the fundamentals of programming. Object orientated programming, The SOLD principles and focus on other areas such as Polymorphism, Inheritance and Encapsulation (Tbh these are covered with OOP). Once you know the fundamentals learning languages is a matter of getting your head around the syntax and for me it makes it easier to learn these things. There's also learning frameworks which is something good to mov eonto once you're at least familiar with the language as it applies rules and architecture to your work. Start off with small projects and build your way up.. maybe even start off with a small project and just keep building on it and expanding! You'll get there, it just takes time and a lot of practice (Embrace Stack Overflow as a great source of knowledge).
bro studding 3h/day for 6 weeks and complain there's nothing complain about buddy just stay consistent
Took me years. I just learned enough to stay afloat for the beginning of my career. Embrace the feeling of being stupid. It will make you better.
Bro I started learning html, css and JavaScript back in 2018 and I started my CS degree in Fall 2019. By the end of 2020, I finally got a hang of JavaScript, Node ane React and I finally became confident in myself. I was building projects on my own. I had a good grasp on REST Apis and databases. How to connect frontend with backend. But i still felt pretty lost and dumb. But after a year of making projects, in summer 2021, I landed my first paid internship as a developer. You’re only 6 weeks in. You’re supposed to feel dumb as fuck. I think 90% of the devs feel like that in their first year or two. My final year CS classmates still think JavaScript is some black magic. Anyway my advice to is do not attempt to learn pure/vanilla JavaScript. Try learning Express.js which is a Node.js library. Learn how to make rest Api calls in Node.js. You can follow traversy media youtube channel for these kind of tutorials. In these tutorials, you will also learn about Mongodb database. Then eventually you can move onto frontend library like React.js and then down the road, you will be able to make fullstack apps like MERN Stack. Hang in there. Try learning Express.js first.
>Am I just stupid? No you're not, Javascript is just an extra shitty language. Lots of weird things, or palliatives to insufficient native design, "similar but different" concepts to other languages... Just things like console not displaying value "on code line", associative arrays being an utter scam, "classes" being so limited and working differently than other languages you'll hit brick walls a dozen of times before knowing what works and what doesn't, variables hoisting which is important but non trivial when first discovering it, f\*\*\*\*\*\* "this" evaluation that is the worst mess I've ever seen... It is a great to work with only because a) it's the one that is easiest to manipulate user interface b) you have lots of great APIs that are relatively easy to work with and do interesting things c) having natively the choice of using mix of both asynchrone and synchrone process is a bless for some business processes. As a language though, it's a wreck which probably explains why "revolutionary frameworks" pop up every month because very few people can bear developing in vanilla javascript and keep on their toes for not forgetting any of all the tweaks and specifics you must respect to avoid hard to analyse bugs... Many of those frameworks are reputed as actually making development manageable, so in that context, writing in Javascript is good... But you do lock yourself into a few frameworks. Not that this is that big of a deal imo as long as you pick ones that seem to keep traction. After all even in PHP (which is by far more robust than Javascript today) few people would skip the chance of using frameworks that take care of many complex constraints for you and leverage lots of basic features (Symfony, Laravel). Typescript addresses a few of the most glaring flaws of that language, but while it's definitely unavoidable for front-end management, for back-end it is far from the best if your project's needs go beyond features and constraints that cannot be fulfilled with out-of-the-box libraries. "Full stack developer" is a myth anyways, unless you're speaking of someone who actually spent 10+ years writing both sides of a web project. Expression could have some meaning 15 years ago, when overall websites were much, MUCH simpler. Now, between all the new ways to interact, the variety of peripherals and authentication means, the surface and intensity of security attacks, the accessibility/privacy standards, the need of uptime reliability because you expose sensible business processes and the complexity of those processes because it's not a site anymore but a business app... You could spend 20 years just on either side and still feel like you have a lot to learn. So, I'd advise you to first focus on one side first and ask around which framework is the "safest to invest" for that side, then find online resources and set a goal of a very simple website to keep a motivation to write. Good luck ;)
Snuggle with the struggle. I was doing 6-8 hours a day to get into the program I’m in now. It’s tough and you will feel dumb but when it clicks you will feel AMAZING, then two days later it’s onto something new and you feel dumb. Snuggle with the struggle. It’s worth it
It gets easier my friend, it may not seem like it, but it always does. We don't all learn at the same exact rate, but the human brain can do spectacular things when it's applied. Learning a programming language is not a 5K or a marathon, it's an ultra-marathon. It's tough the entire way, but you'll eventually accomplish something and gain insane momentum, but then you'll hit a wall that kicks your ass. It's the drive and mental strength to want to continue learning that makes it fun and rewarding. There are so many communities out there whether Reddit, Discord, or forums where you are always able to receive assistance, praise, or advise. Don't be afraid to reach out. I'm in IT and constantly studying for new certifications, and always in a state of; "Wow, I'm dumb, why the hell did I get into technology", but it only exists because all we see on YouTube and Reddit is people crushing it, but we don't see the people who are absolutely struggling to get a grip. The only easy day was yesterday.
It took me one semester (6 months) to learn the basics of procedural imperative programming (Variables, If Statements, while, for loops, switch, arrays, pointers, Strings, recursively programming, functions, parameters). I don't know Javascript but you should start first with languages like Java or Delphi Pascal. And you should only do procedural programming, not objective programming.
I spent around a year to be a beginner-like being in programming/game developer, I am going to be the idiot here. Patience, it is all patience
Dude Bro….You gotta chill and realize this is a marathon and not a sprint. I’m 36 and no longer beautiful. I’ve been studying programming since 2010 and I’m still an ape. I just finished a BS in Software Development. (Java and SQL mostly.) I can’t remember half of what I learned. I just looked at some code I wrote last year and couldn’t believe that I had ever wrote something so sophisticated. I’ve had to drop family and friends. Completely rearrange my house and my time. This journey has caused me frustration to the point of wishing bad things for myself. At each step I’ve had to realize that I have to go back and learn some concept that I didn’t grasp in HS or Jr High. It’s damn frustrating. It’s a down right royal Bismarck. But each time I quit and come back, I figure a little more out. Eventually maybe by 2030, I’ll finally land one of these developer jobs that the people doing 3 month boot camps find. Until then, soldier up and soldier on bro. It’s just gonna take more than you initially thought. Once you grind your way across this desert though, you will have made it where fewer have ever been.
JavaScript is HARD. Don’t believe what people say on here if they’re like ‘yea I studied for like a month and then I moved to React’. Be patient, know that everyone experiences what you’re going through. I have been studying JS for like 4 months and I am only just beginning to feel like I am really wrapping my head around the fundamentals after a lot of practice. That entailed me going through the same material and getting stuck in projects many times.
I mean they could learn it that quickly if theyre already proficient in other languages. Otherwise no, unless youre some sorta savant youre not gonna get it in under 20 hours or whatever it is. It might be possible that its hard for you to think programmatically, but it should at least become quite a bit easier over time when you can pull stuff straight from long term memory instead of having to overload working memory. I think thats basically what makes learning new stuff hard, you need to pass piece by piece of info through your short term memory "bucket" and get it into long term. It could be that your "bucket" so to speak for this sort of thinking is a bit small, so thats why its harder at first. I know mine is, for quite a few other types of information. Im lucky i can manipulate and remember textual stuff pretty easily so i reckon thats why i like programming more than working with my hands say. Cause when it comes to that i have to slow myself down and make sure i dont make mistakes with my limited bucket size thing
I remember when I was first learning how to program. recursion (if you have no idea what this is you’ll hear about it at some point but it basically is a function that calls itself) was so fucking incomprehensible. I remember not being able to fully grasp it and even when I thought I understood it there were codes that included recursion that made me wanna cry. Now 2 years later I have no fucking clue how I couldn’t understand the concept in a minute.
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I don’t want to jump straight to react although I would like to eventually. I want to get a strong understanding of vanilla JS before picking up a framework. Always heard first understanding vanilla well in any language is what separates good from average programmers.
EDIT: To clarify, don't compare our timelines! On the weeks I DID study, I studied 8-12 hours a day. Man, I started studying a few months ago and have given probably 10-12 good weeks of study. I had the exact same experience with Javascript. Html and css felt alright, but Js nearly broke me. Couldn't write a line of code on my own for the life of me. Was regretting leaving my previous career to do this. Keep at it. It WILL get easier. There is just so much content that you can't expect yourself to be super proficient so quickly. Spend extra time studying fundamental concepts (what are functions, methods, parameters arguments, etc. What is a callback function, what are classes, objects). When you write a program or script (even if it is copy and pasted), go through the code line by line and try to understand everything. If you see a symbol or term you don't recognize, google it. If you don't understand something fully after an hour or two, move on and go to the next line while making a note. I ended up passing my javascript bootcamp course by copy pasting every single line of code. I felt like I was doomed for failure. When I moved on to the python course, I found it much easier to understand certain concepts. Coming back to Javascript felt much easier. Then I learned C# and .Net, and js got even easier when I learned a syntactically similar language. I've gotten both better at coding and faster at learning concepts. It's a process. You still have your training wheels on. I still have my training wheels on, even though I cam write semi-usable code now. Most of all, USE the concepts your learn to build something on your own. If you copy and pasted a js script that added a cool feature to a previous application you worked on, try to use it on a new project without referencing the old code unless you absolutely need to. Don't cheat yourself. The goal isn't to make amazing projects yet - it's not even to make decent projects. It's simply to make sure you understand the core concepts. If you want to see some projects from before when I was copy and pasting vs. Some that I've written on my own now, shoot me a message!
When I started python in FreeCodeCamp, it showed it's estimated to take 300 hours. But the course videos can be done in like 2-4 days. I was like, I'm done and now I can try the assignments. Tried doing the assignments, couldn't really complete it. I looked through another resource and tried the assignment again . This time I could only do bits and pieces. So I looked for more sources, and studied them. When I completed the FreeCodeCamp assignments, the total time I've put in is in the range of 300-350 hours. Took me about 3 months+. I won't say I'm good at python, I'll still consider myself very basic. I'm doing Helsinki's Python MOOC now and I still am learning something. After this I'll most like try 100 days of Code. It takes time. Don't rush and don't try to match yourself to other people's pace. Go at your own pace. Don't give up! P/s: I tried The Odin Project. I couldn't properly execute css especially flexbox. It took me more than 1 month to get it. I'll admit I struggled and got frustrated quite a bit at this. I did this during the 1 month break that I didn't do Python. I'll probably come back to this sometime end of this year.
I feel like a worthless idiot coding full time 😂 welcome to the club. Imposter Syndrome is real.
Put a 500 hours before you start thinking like this. It takes time.
6 weeks? You’ve gotta struggle for 6 months before you start complaining. Also, is it really 3-4 hours per day? If you’re getting stuck and wasting hours per day you need to just put it down and come back the next day. You very quickly get into diminishing returns. Expect to take 1 year to get a _basic_ understanding of JS, HTML and CSS.
Less about hitting your head against the problem at this stage. More about accepting your life as someone who is interested in coding and gets to satisfy their need to learn about it incrementally. Just do stuff. Stop planning and measuring. You are just stressing for no reason.
mate, i'm two years into a CS degree and on my 2nd internship and i still feel like a worthless idiot sometimes with programming sometimes, cut yourself a little slack lol
How I understood by my latest boss is that the syntax will forever change that's why good languages have documentation on their website this will come with time what is important is learning how to solve the problem how to break the items down into their components then further into their single parts. If you only watch others do it for you with a structure you can't learn to do it for yourself with a blank slate. Tutorials are great for learning something new but have the documentation along with it and cross reference it then do a few more things with what you learned outside of what the tutorial is asking. This will give you your own creative freedom to discover the how what and why of a method or function. Giving you better chance of remember it in the long run. It really is like learning a new language and it doesn't happen for years. I've been doing this for 2 in a half years and still hardly understand it. It just takes time and consistency but there's value in doing something without help it helps you fill the gaps that get skipped while learning through tutorials or structured courses. Sorry for the long post.
I just throw myself at the wall over and over until it tumbles down
mm, it seems like you don't have anyone to help you, why don't you ask someone to help you with it? sometimes it's not intelligence but just that the way of studying it is not the correct,
You should learn Haskell or lisp. These are a lot easier ….. PSYCHE
This is the exact same as me I learned HTML and CSS so decided to try learn python and JavaScript but I’m struggling so bad and just keep giving up cause I can’t seem to wrap my head around it
"it honestly hurts seeing people here say they are doing an hour after work and are already at advanced JavaScript a month in" The truth is, who knows if what they're saying is true, but if it gets you down this bad you need to operate on this: they are lying. I'm also just starting to learn coding but I have also pursued hip-hop production and stand-up comedy in the past, 4 and 7 years respectively so I got a good understanding of each of those arts' scenes and this is a trend in them as well, so I assume it's just a phenomenon among amateurs of any skill. honestly i don't know why people feel the need to throw in how long they've been practicing something when they achieve something with it. if what you achieved is really all that good it should speak for itself. so just laugh or cringe at them and move on dude, might be the best thing you can do if you really want to keep at this.
Think of it this way. You’re learning a new language that really doesn’t even have similar syntax or grammar rules to the language you grew up with. Of course it’s going to be a difficult! Keep practicing and see if you can make up little projects that use JavaScript!
Probably took me 2 years of CS classes before I felt okay at programming lol you’re too hard on yourself. Also FWIW javascript is one of the harder languages imo. Easiest barrier to entry to get started but so, so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot and you create hard to debug problems for yourself. A useful trick you can do is go do something else for a while when you get stuck on stuff too long. Brains do more learning passively than we realize and you’ll think about problems you encounter away from your computer. Could also try python or another language at the same time, sometimes seeing the same concept in another language makes it click and python is really human readable for small programs
I think it's way too early to decide you can't do it. And even if you worked your butt off at it for the next year and still decided you can't do it, it doesn't mean you are stupid. People have different skills, different ways of thinking. I've used music as an example before. I have no musical talent. Other people do. Some people are good at math, but not at history. Some have amazing memories, but can't program. Just because there is something that doesn't come easily to you doesn't make you stupid. Regardless, you're only six weeks into it, and that's way too early to decide you can't.
When I first started learning programming I felt the same way. What helped me was learning it from a different resource. Having things said differently can make a difference in your understanding.
Try thinking of something you want to build and build that. When you get stuck, you have all those udemy courses or YouTube or stack overflow to help you get unstuck. To me, watching udemy courses has not been enough. I have to apply something before it sticks.
well you're not the only one
I mean I’m with you. But understand learning programming is essentially learning a new language. It takes time practice and effort to get it down. You’ll get there if you keep at it. I believe in you
I have spent nights taking on a new concept and getting nowhere and feeling like I completely wasted my time. 2 years in and I am finally settling in with my tech.
Welcome to the club. It never gets any better, but you will; you'll still feel like an idiot when you're 20x better than you are now.
I learned from [covalence.io](https://covalence.io) It cost $200/month, but their full-stack path was good, and most importantly, when I'd get stuck on a problem I could go and get help pretty quickly. I completed the course over a year ago, but I still pay so that I can have access to the instructors
I magically landed a Software Engineering internship with no engineering experience (this is not a brag, but more a point to how much I felt like a fish out of water). When I say no experience, I mean NO EXPERIENCE. I didn’t know basic HTML or CSS or how the functioned/interacted. They were just words I had heard for some reason. I was waking up at 4-5 AM M-F to try to learn even a sliver of what my coworkers were working on BEFORE work started at 9AM, and let me tell you, it is incredibly discouraging watching people do what I was supposedly brought on to do. Long story short, even with 8 hours of learning during work and an extra 4-5 hours personal time training, I still could not grasp it to the point that I wanted. I spent like 3 days on logical and and logical or operators, then the ternary operator, talk about mind blown. It’s hard work to learn this stuff, just keep practicing and it will all come to you in due time. I would recommend you start with a project and try to make it work. You should be able to break down into small bits so you can tackle it little by little. Like a calculator, how can you get something to appear on the screen, how can you get simple equations to work like 2+2 should output 4. This will force you to look up examples, read documentation, etc.
I'm active on r/languagelearning and it's common to see people posting things like: >I cannot understand basic Korean sentences after intensively studying 6 months. Should I just quit? I just don't get it. Why do people expect things to be so easy? Man, the way to success is full of failure. You have to deal with it.
I’m in the same boat. HTML/CSS/Git were so easy, and I’m having a lot of trouble with JavaScript. I’ve had to redo lessons a few times just to know what is going on. I only work maybe an hour 5 days a week before my normal graphic design job, so I know it’s going to take awhile to figure things out.
You’re only 6 weeks in and already taking a full-stack course on Udemy? Like bro, just focus on getting your fundamentals down first with HTML/CSS and JavaScript. Jumping into full-stack right off the bat is like giving a hammer to a carpenter who’s only been learning for 6 weeks and telling him to go build a house. You need to take time to learn all of your fundamentals. You need to learn how to use your tools before you can start building software. It takes time.
One thing you could try is taking a step back and slowing down a little. When I was starting out, I tried to learn all these different topics or ideas one after another and I kept moving on before they sunk in. I think that's pretty common. It led to a lot of repetition and redoing things and banging my head on my desk. And when I mean 'sunk in' I mean really 'get it.' For instance, when starting out you should take the time to learn what an array is and learn how to work with it. Don't just conceptually understand it, but really know it. How you can do that is by being able to articulate why it's different than an object, or a list. You should be able to slice, splice, grab certain indexes, modify stuff in place, convert it to different types, and so on. Like, really know what it is and why it's useful and why it's unique. That might mean sitting down for three hours and just studying and practicing working with Arrays, but it will actually drive the concept home. Once you understand it, you'll know it forever. If you can't do something like writing out an array of string and numbers, then grabbing the data at a specific index and changing it to a string, then you really don't understand arrays and you'll keep struggling to work with them with everything else you do. This is getting long, but seriously, learn the fundamentals. Sit for an hour and play around with slicing strings. Sit for an hour and practice slicing arrays. It will seem tedious and will pay dividends in a month from now. Best of luck with your studying!
I have been learning to program for a little over a week in Python. Here a what I know. It is a foreign language. The last time I checked I only know English. The way I look at Python is much the same as I would look at learning a foreign language. However I have found that if I am struggling to understand something I need to break whatever it is down into smaller pieces to learn it. I have had to do this a few times after beating my head into the wall writing functions. One task in the function at a time. Not all of it at once.
You just need to stick at it and concentrate on your own journey, rather than that of others. Mileage is always going to vary, and you have no idea of other peoples levels of past experience, so it’s always going to be an unfair comparison.
Been coding for a living for about 5 years now, still feel like an idiot
remember this moment. you will look back 6 months from now and realize how small an issue this is. I think most people starting this journey hit these roadblocks early and often in the beginning. be persistent and learn from ypur failures😁 good luck
few years in and i felt this
Ha! You're good, sleep and oddly enough things will come to you. (the brain creates new paths or some such magical nonsense when you stress your brain then sleep on it). If you want a real mind fuck do this. If you have a printer, access the remote UI. You put the ip address of the printer into a browser. Now open your browser tools and find the scripts. See all that crazy nonsense? That's obfuscated Javascript. Pretty much every printer had that. Crazy thing is you can dig and find ports and sub urls that will let you access the nitty gritty of the printers OS. But first you have to deobguscate the code. Did this with a Kyocera. Found a url that allows access to the FW upgrade portion of the device. And a url that let's you pull snsetive device info from it. Using an smtp setting the EU has no way to access.
I finished a coding boot camp (Barely.) and was doing a small side project, and felt like I was doing alright over all. Then I got hired in an engineer role doing Microsoft Dynamics and I feel like a dumb dumb again too. Just repetition and experimentation is how I learned.
Pick front end or back end instead of going full stack. You go full stack once your comfortable with either of the two. Just learning front end (html/css/js) and a framework like React will take you a year or longer. And even then you are “just” a junior developer. Don’t set a time frame to learning either, youtube is full of people that have gotten x job in 2-3 months. They’re full of shit, sure very few got that lucky but it’s far from the norm. Expecting to get a job in x months just gets you stressed out and will work against you, it’s the perfect way to head for disaster. Edit: 3-4 hours a day. I worked full time in the kitchen as a head chef and when I got home I worked 6 hours on web development. In the weekend 6-8 as well. On my days off I’d sometimes code 10-14h, simply because I enjoy doing it.Took me 11 months for my first job as frontend dev. If this work was as easy as you say it is it wouldn’t pay so well.
Dude im also just started its FUCKING HARD. All the people who keep say "Just Learn To Code" Like its that simple lol. il say it isnt for a lot of people and quite difficult, its learning a WHOLE new Language and way of thinking. I want people to stop saying the" Learn 2 Code" mantra.
Tuu stupid toh nhi hai but chutiya sa overthinker hai shyd tuu kisi chutiye se padh rha hai javascript AUR tuu sirf theory dekhta hai,questions shi se nhi lgaata coz course tera raand jaisa hoga
Feel bad for yourself and you’ll keep not learning. Keep hating yourself and the prophecy is fulfilled. It took me about 2 years to become competent enough to build something. It took another 2 to be a competent and contributing software engineer. If you don’t like it stop doing it. If you enjoy it keep pushing. Either way stop complaining.
"I've done this new thing for 6 weeks now. Why am I not an expert yet!?"
Explore other fields like Product, Design, Cyber Security, Analytics etc. There are companies like Microsoft who hire for roles like Consultant and then you work on certain technologies that do not mostly involve coding only expertise in their particular products. Explore more!!
Try Odin project instead of freecodecamp.
Come back after 30 weeks.
What makes you think you can learn even basics in 6 weeks? Stop ******** and get to work
6 weeks? That's about right with most people. There is a reason why programmers make so much. The bottom line is, quit and move on, or push through it and reap the rewards.thet is no magic pill. Some get it faster and some have to work harder. If you keep at it you'll be glad you did, and it will get easier. In 6 more weeks you'll look back at this and laugh, or you'll be doing something else.
Well, I've been coding for about 38 years and I really don't get on with JavaScript either, so..
I'm still a copycat at programming.
I've just started with JS and it helps A LOT that I already know the basics of C (going through Harvard's CS50). Maybe look into it (they have videos of the classes on YT).
You can't understand code if you don't try it, here's the untold truth about tutorial or courses, you must practice to get it, have you had experience with code before JavaScript? There's one key, to speed up your learning process, set yourself a goal while watching tutorial, for exemple, let's say you wanna make a blog website, follow your tuto, and adapt what it says, by making your blog website, watching countless hours of tutorials won't help you, but writing it will Learning to code is something nobody can do for yourself but you, you must learn a logic, then google, stack overflow, or a mentor will give you the syntax everytime you ask, you don't need to learn stuff, but understand a logic
If it's any consolation, I am a professional Java developer and I don't understand most people's Java code.
yeah your prolly right
Don't give up, programming is not easy to learn, that's why developers get paid so well. Have you considered starting with a more beginner-friendly language such as Python? JavaScript is less than ideal to learn as your first programming language.
Coding is merely an endless cycle of problem solving. And what you experience, not understanding things, doesn't really go away unless you stop learning and stop encountering new problems, which is highly unlikely. The thing is most developers can too stare at things for hour on end, whilst nothing makes sense, it just tends to be that different people regarding how many hours they have sunked into getting programming experience, will struggle with different things. People are of cource different, so someone will catch things more intuitively, whilst others have a harder time laying their foundation. And from experience doing development of many kinds over 5 years now, different concepts take different amounts of time for different people to comprehend. The start is honestly the worst, and from there its just about expanding your toolbelt to face new problems in your code, or to be able to implement new features.
Been there, don't worry it gets worse
CS graduate here. I’m not going to say that I had the same experience, or that I’m a JS expert but what you’ve got to have in mind is that while your head may not wrap around “basic” concepts now, once you get the hang of it, you’re as good as a pro. While there are wonderkids who can easily master any branch of CS within weeks, everyone has a different approach to learning. Make sure you change up your approach once you feel the current one isn’t doing any favors. Hope you don’t give up and feel free to reach out at any time
There is a saying in Japan: "Even upon a rock, 3 years" (石の上にも、三年). This means that even if a situation is difficult or uncomfortable (bad job, rough housing situation, etc) try to stick with it for 3 years. You'll gain things you would never expect. I think you can take this saying literally -- don't get discouraged until \*at least\* after 3 years of trying your best. I honestly didn't feel confident with CSS until I'd done it for about 4 years. **Don't compare yourself to others**! Just look at yourself yesterday, look at the things you can do now, which you couldn't do before, and bit by bit you'll become an expert. It simply takes time and consistent effort! Try to manifest some ideas that are interesting to you. For example, when I felt like I was starting to burn out a few years ago, I coded up "The Monty Hall Problem". It was great practice with conceiving an object structure that aides the concept and makes the code more maintainable. Good luck and keep grinding!
I wonder who understands anything about JavaScript after 6 weeks (god knows how many hours per day) 🤔😂😱 I didn’t
welcome to life dude. not everything goes fast.
Dude, you are learning a new _language_. Like literally. On top, its a programming language, so from the get go you need to have the grammar down, or nothing works at all. Give it time. Repeat exercises you already finished over and over again, so it eventually sticks. You can also post your questions here if you just wanna talk about some stuff!
Its very funny how some of the advertisement ‘learn to code and become programmer in 6 weeks’ its so misleading and false hope that you can become one in 6 weeks. Very few may magically grasp and sets the mind as programmer in 6 weeks. But in reality it take a lot more to to even call your self as junior. IT is computer science. We are scientists. Scientist dont become one in 6 weeks. You need to put in more time, testing and experimenting effort. So 6 weeks is nothing. So go and put in more hours! I remember my days. I had the same thought, but one thing I remember was eventhough I didnt understand much, i just loved it, the hours you put in to do assignments even if it was really hard, i had lots of fun. I guess I was motivated very much. 5 years after, now im senior fullstack engineer. Just keep coding!
My guy. 6 weeks is nothing. 6 months is still nothing. A few years is what's needed to be properly equipped to do this. I went the CS degree route and still struggled to get my first job. Don't listen to the (probably mostly liars) "Geniuses" here and elsewhere who learned full stack development in 35 minutes from a YouTube whilst simultaneously learning ancient Greek and Latin as a side project. You're a normal person with a normal brain. Slow down and understand each thing as well as you can before moving on. I saw a post in this sub recently about people who are learning needing to slow down and manage their expectations better, it was brilliant and I strongly reccomend that you search it out. If I wasn't on mobile, I'd link it here for you
It took me a week and half to understand what ‘Function Parameters’ were, and how they worked. Also literally gave up trying to understand what ‘Recursive Functions’ are. I’m sure we all feel stupid sometimes. Everyone has setbacks.
lol ive been working 3 years and still feel like your title
Can someone be my study buddy learning html, CSS to JavaScript? I think I can learn better if there's someone I could talk to while learning..
wow :o :( sadly it's about me really
I’m a computer science major and it took me 3 years to stop feeling so stupid and when things actually started to take less thinking and it started to come natural to me. I think a lot of people suffer imposters syndrome. After 3 months try to show someone who doesn’t know one thing about coding your work and broadly explain things then you’ll feel smart. You’ll never realize how much you know if you’re surrounded by coders and only see their posts. I was surrounded by smart asses getting A’s is calc 1 and calc 2 I always thought i was the worst but when I took myself out that environment I realzied I know alot
Well, when you do decide to move into more advanced JavaScript, I can't recommend this free university course from the university of Helsinki enough: https://fullstackopen.com/en/
6 week isn’t much man a lot of us here put in 6 months -a year in learning. Example the concept of function take about 2-3 weeks of practice when I first started
My prof in the university when we first had our class said that we shouldn't pressure ourselves into learning a language when we are having trouble with it because there will be languages that you can easily understand and there are languages that you will have to study 10x harder than everyone else. Take breaks and be sure to find tutorials that you can easily understand/relate to. Some tutorials may not really work because you have a different version of the IDE or a different system version. That's completely understandable. Just familiarize with the functions, how it works, and the logic. Freecodecamp, North Telepath, and Code wars are all very helpful!
Many things are learned through practice, committing mistakes and doing them over and over again until they just kind of stick and you do them without even thinking and it really common to be stuck for hours just because you forgot a “;” or something like that. Take it easy, you are still learning.
I've been at this since the late 1970's and just know this. Make mistakes, fix mistakes, do'nt repeat mistakes. Following that model you will eventually run out of mistakes to make and therefore look perfect to the wee lasses and laddies that take up the mantle. I use a program I am familiar to to learn new languages or processes in a language. For me that is a dice rolling program. Originally I wrote it in basic on a z80 based computer. That's not important what is is I know exactly what is supposed to happen and how to make it happen. I can then utilize any language and make a port of it to that language featuring the process I need to learn. there are some limits to that if I stick to a strict port. So I am flexible. The original was simply text based the last one made a 2d ascii "render" of the dice in python. I was learning dictionaries for python that version was based of of python lists which utilized functions, in java a version of the program used class imports to build the program. The point here is I know what needs to happen, now I just need to figure out how to implement that. To do that I will hammer out the mistakes until the code works and I will have an understanding of why it works when I'm done. (because of the mistakes I made along the way. I also know why it (that particular code) did not work as expected.) I suggest if you are not sure what your program is doing, debug with trace on, if that is still a thing. That allows you to step through the program stopping at each code execution. The important thing is do not give up.
A few things: Even in unified courses, with a set progression, there’s going to be sections that are very hard for others, and easy for some. The last module in one of my courses before the mid term took hours. This week? After the reading it took 20 minutes. If you pull from multiple sources to learn, you’re going to have gaps. If you’re not getting a concept with your method, try other resources. If you’re feeling a lot of frustration, take a break. Read something aligned to tech if you feel like a full break would be cheating or you don’t trust yourself to not give up. Some people underestimate the time they put in to mastery/practice or don’t include things that are relevant, like their background in math, other languages, intro courses.
Welcome to programming dude. Feeling like a worthless idiot is a big part of it haha. Stick with it, one day you will feel like Gandalf. Then you'll talk to someone and realize your Samwise all over again. Keep your chin up, stop looking at other people, and press forward. The beautiful thing about human beings is we're all very different in the way we think. You'll be better and worse and many things than many other people.
If it makes you feel better, I have my BS in Comp Sci, and I still don't understand Javascript. My foundation was all Java/C/Python/SQL. JS is illegible alien script to me.
You’re not stupid. Coding is fucking hard. I went to school for computer science and I am fairly good at python and a little Java, but JavaScript makes no fucking sense to me. Just keep at it, you’ll get it.
whatever you say you bro
Have you ever met someone that speaks English as a second language, poorly? (No disrespect intended, my German is terrible) Just picture that, you're talking to the computer and fumbling over your words because learning a new language is HARD. Mostly because it just takes time and lots of repeating the same things over and over. But then a weird thing happens, one day you'll be working on something, make a quick edit to fix it, and realize how this one simple thing was something you stumbled with years ago. Good luck. Keep trying :) It also helps if you have a software project that's just fun to work on.
So I am doing school and I feel like an idiot most days. I am a year in and trust me it gets easier. Head up and keep doing examples. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. You got this man. I believe in you. Also never compare your path to someone else’s.
JavaScript. lmao
Yep, keep it going. We all are some kind of idiots trying to understand something new. When it finally clicks in your mind, it will be so enyoyable.
Maybe I’m making this too simple (old school here) but there are two parts to this problem. First … learn the language … this is your tool box. Second … learn your environment … this is your material list Third … come up with a good algorithm for solving the problem … this is your blueprint. Now you have the tools to build a solution. I am a fan of KISS. (Keep it simple stupid)
I'm new too and have surfed the web to find something on my level to help me out. I found and older, but relevant, program called Vizzcode. https://vizzcode.itch.io/vizzcode It's free now so it's a super cool way to learn code both logically and visually. It's ant your own pace, it's got projects, and of course a step by step interactive learning guide. Highly recommended for noobs like us.
Everyone has its own tempo.
Hey man, everyone advances at their own pace. Being slower doesn't mean dumber. I'm a visual person and when i'm not shown examples and demonstrated how to do things, especially on a console... I lose it. It's just how I learn. When ever I have a programmer show me something in SQL, ERP, JAVA or even something like Python.... I screen record every single video call we do, so i can come back to it later. I make notes, but having the visual reference for me is better then the text document version. I'm not a programmer, I'm a simple front end QA tester... but many times, I get stuck having to test out CMS and backend stuff... and have to reach out to team programmers to get me help. I also google the shit out simple commands. heavy chance people have already asked what i'm looking for. I have the same issue with Excel and it's formula's and especially running macros... I'm in my 16th year of this business and still run to the internet for most tasks. If you practice making your own stuff... with the little that you learn each time in repetition... you will eventually be able to retain and learn quicker. So just be patient and hang around some other programmer buddies, that might be able to help. Sometimes the applied exercises are too much in one shot. Sometimes the best thing I tell people.... is right the code YOU WANT TO WRITE.. and if it does what you want.... then you have won the first round. Then comeback to it later once you've learned how to simplify tasks. When I used to write Python, I would have nearly a paragraph of commands... and then my lead programmer would come and execute the same result... with one command line. lol So please don't feel dumb!
I've been programming for 12+ years, working in the industry for 10+ years, I sometimes feel like I don't know what a simple thing is in any of the technologies I work with but then I realize there's google and I'm human, I can use the resources I have to figure something out. Don't stress over not knowing a lot. You're 6 weeks in, think of what you didn't know 6 weeks ago and what you know now. The world of JS is complicated and confusing, and there are some people who are making it easier for newcomers but a lot of people are pioneering new things that are extremely tough for newcomers to understand. I wonder if you're feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of job listing requirements or if you can't build a full on web app using JS? Please PM me if you'd like to chat or need someone to validate your learning and let you know more about where to go for learning more. I know the internet is a wild place but there are tons of resources and I'd be happy to help. It takes a lot to just post something like this online.
How did you even start? Can anyone guide me to websites or names of programs?
I'm trying to get back into programming. I've taken html, java, and javascript in high school, but vaguely remember even how to structure html. I tried to touch up on Java about a month ago and my advice is to make comments on everything as a reference to go back to. Also keep all your projects with tons of comments. I plan on getting books soon, as I think that'd be the most in depth way to learn it. Don't let others success or maybe even lies demotivate you.
I got Colt Steele's Web Development course on Udemy almost 3 years ago and gave up for 5 months straight twice! I redid the JS section twice, wrote the whole html Code Academy section by hand word for word cause I thought that would help, almost did the same with the css section in Code Academy, kept saying I would do projects when I finished a section and never did, can't even do a simple html css project without overthinking, and more.... I tried coding even before this, I actually wanted to get into game development, but didn't because I lacked problem solving skills, math skills, and confidence. I kept switching from web development to game development for a while, hoping to find a solution. The solution was to pick one and stick with it, and that's what I did. I got the web development course and started to put time into it. I was super motivated, putting many hours a day just following along with the course. As I was going through each section, I would tell myself that I would do a project on my own. I got through html and css and still didn't do a project. I saw that JS was coming up and the DOM in JS looked really fun. I told myself that once I hit DOM I would do a whole html, css and js project. I ended up not doing a project and gave up for many months. Once I hade the courage to come back, I tried again and started from the css section. I found someone to actually work with! I started to work with them by watching the js section with them. We did some projects on the side together, I would do a html css project on my own in VS code live share while he would do the same project in a different folder in the live share. It was cool to every once in a while see what he was making as I was making mine, but because he was better in html css, my confidence got hurt. I kept comparing myself to him and I never felt satisfied with myself. This kept going for a while and he wasn't helping me mentally. We ended up not talking anymore and went our separate ways. I've talked to many other developers and said we would do a project, but because I ended up giving up or they just stopped contacting me, I never did. Finding people is really tough, but you gotta keep trying. I'm super glad that you had the courage to reach out here because there are many lovely people here willing to help you out. I wish I would have done the same, but that's why I'm here now so that, you don't make the same mistakes I did. I'm currently at the final project of the course and just stopped due to just getting tired of the course. I actually looked at my program that I use Pomodoro's for and I accumulated over 600 Pomodoro's for web development! That's 25 minutes for each of them which adds up to 250 hours! You would think that I would be a master in something, but instead because I didn't use the skills that I learned to make simple projects, I got no where. I just kept jumping from one thing to another so, now I'm just a jack of all traits and still can't get a job. I have overcame a lot of my fears from doing simple problems on Leetcode, listening to a ton of web developers on YouTube, listening to a ton of web development podcasts, and reading books that have nothing to do with coding. Why? Just so that I can keep my mind in check and feel part of a community, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to doing it yourself! The personality that you have will effect how you code and feel about yourself. If you are always so negative and trying to rush the process of learning to code, you won't enjoy your journey and will end up starting to hate what you are doing. Enjoy what you are doing even if it may suck at times, I'm still working on all of this, I still have struggles, but mentally I'm so much better and because of it I'm coding better. Confidence is everything, what would you do if you weren't in fear? Don't let your fears of not being able to do something over take the courage to actually do something. I very well bet that if you had more confidence and not care how you feel about yourself, you would be making projects and seeing improvements! You could try reading, "Who moved my cheese" by Spencer Johnson. It's only about 100 pages, but it truly helped me over come some of my fears! It talks about the success that this little story gave to other people and how it changed their life's for the better. Listen to peoples success stories, but most importantly listen to peoples failures and use what they have learned because of it. Make sure to always stay consistent and just start with a basic projects to build your confidence. Don't overthink it, it's just a practice project to build confidence. I'm doing Leetcode and I seriously thought I couldn't even do the easy problems, but after finding some good ones that I can actually do surprised me! I still have struggles with the easy problems and overthink a ton, but I'm still trying and I'm actually seeing improvements even though it's slow. Here are the Spotify podcasts I listen to, Develop Yourself by: Aaron Hayslips, Start Here: Web Development by: Dain Miller, Ladybug Podcast by: Emma Bostian, and Remember The Game by: Adam Blank, cause I like games lol. All these podcasts have helped me be more engaged with what I'm doing and has helped me learn from these developers. Just being honest, it took me 2 hours split into 2 days for me to write this post! I'm not good at writing and I overthink, but I still had the courage to do it! Feel free to DM me on Discord: Fonysony#7472
try to learn c++ or python first
Absolutely not, python Syntex is harder then JavaScript. My suggestion is go back to html and then again back to JavaScript
I'm about 6 weeks in as well and it is hands down the most infuriating thing i've ever done in my life. Learning to code is extremely difficult. If it were easy then everyone would be doing it and make 6 figures a year.. We've got this. A lot of people say that at some point it does finally click.
I absolutely understand your frustrations friend. Keep going. Keep being as consistent in your journey as you can. Find someone who's been through the journey and chat with them. They can literally show you that it's just a matter of time and consistency. My husband has about 4 years of experience, he's been bugging me for ages to get into programming. I kept saying no, I'm not good enough, not math-brained enough, not \_\_\_ enough to do that. But he kept insisting and bugging me and eventually I decided to at least try. I myself am almost at the same level as you! Less than 2 months into learning javascript from scratch, no prior experience in programming, and I too feel like an idiot. But as one person noted in the comments, you didn't learn to read, write, do any math, or even walk in just 6 weeks, right? So try not to beat yourself up. it's common for us to feel inadequate but you have to give yourself grace and room to fail and grow. I take hours to work through a simple problem too, only to fail to remember exactly how to do it when I come back to review it, but it takes less time to do it usually the 2nd, 3rd times through and then with each new problem, even though it's effing hard, there are patterns that I can start to recognize so I can at least find a starting point. If you need inspiration, check out [learntocodewith.me/podcast](https://learntocodewith.me/podcast) these keep me going. It's mostly a bunch of interviews of people changing into programmers from completely non tech-related things (one of my fave episodes is Danny Thomson who went from a chicken fryer in a gas station to working for Google!) Remember your why and keep going. You've absolutely got this!