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A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

240 points by michaelq 12y ago

joemellin 12y ago
Yes.
ndcrandall 12y ago
This was one of my biggest issues, even as an experienced developer with a CS degree. I always felt a step behind since I wasn't fluent in the latest and greatest framework. All of that changed when I mentally decided to focus on one language, namely Ruby. It's amazing how much you can do with any one language even though it's not fully optimized for a specific use case you need.
bafilius 12y ago
definitely a lot of good points here
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- ocb 12y ago
  He meant that with regards to Node.js.
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AlexanderDhoore 12y ago
Very very good article, although the latter part is a bit too focussed on web dev and dynamic scripting languages. I personally think every programmer should know some C. Basic things like what the stack and the heap are. Edit: Ok, probably not in the case of absolute beginners, but after a year or two...
- nikhilalmeida 12y ago
  I think C is good to know and try if you are going through an academic program in school. For a lot of people just starting to learn to code (while juggling other responsibilities/jobs/etc), learning C upfront can be an overkill. Being able to implement your idea as soon as possible will be of utmost importance. Sure they can dabble with a little more deeper understanding of language internals and theory once they feel confident enough in the one toolset they have chosen.
- BonsaiDen 12y ago
  There are a whole lot of things every programmer should know because they'll have a profound impact on their code no matter how far up they sit in the abstraction chain. Even things like memory alignment and cache lines can bite you really badly if you don't know about them and order your loop the wrong way around :) Date and Time Handling, Unicode and Data Structures are also a common area for many misconceptions and sources of error. Of course nobody needs to know everything, but have a lively thirst for knowledge always helps, especially one you got over the initial confusion of learning the basics. There's just so much interesting stuff out there and a lot of it will help you improve even if you don't end up using it right away / at all. Even if you're just swimming on the surface, it's always a good thing to know at least the 1-3 meters beneath you, just in case something happens or you get stuck in some seaweed and struggle to get out on your own. I've actually made quite some good experiences with teaching people a few things about ASTs right once they started writing code, even though I only gave the some very basic lessons about how the "text" is eventually transformed, it really helped them a lot in understanding why certain text does certain things. In the end, it's always very hard to play the game successfully if you don't know the rules by which you have to play. And a little can go a long way.
  - jtchang 12y ago
    Do you mind going into memory alignment and cache lines and what would be good to know? I feel like I ignore most of that unless I am coding in C. I mostly do python or Javascript so does that stuff mater when you are that high up in the tech stack?
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dkbrk 12y ago
I think the author is correct in that he tried to learn too many things at once; starting with a friendlier environment and focussing on a small number of new technologies has obvious advantages. But in some other ways, the author is too self-critical: > I'd spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over things as trivial as missing parenthesis. All these things have value, and I doubt that this was time truly wasted. Although some people can get by for a while without it, becoming intimately familiar with the command line is extremely valuable. Also, although this is by no means a requirement for being an effective programmer, most good programmers I know use a traditional text editor such as emacs or vim. Ultimately, I think the point is that expending time is an investment, and you should prioritise based on the expected future utility from your time investment. More often than not, this means finding the most important thing and putting almost all of your energy into it.
- makmanalp 12y ago
  This. I learned programming the "bang your head against the wall" way, and I think I'm much better for it. I'm much more familiar with the innards of my tools, operating systems and programming languages as a result, and I'm much better at debugging things and understanding what's going on when I write a certain piece of code. I also have a pretty diverse set of skills. I find that any information you pick up somewhere eventually ends up being useful elsewhere. But I'm privileged in that I wasn't ever pressured to learn, it wasn't a point where my livelihood depended on it, so that's a factor.
- pwnna 12y ago
  >> I'd spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over things as trivial as missing parenthesis. > All these things have value, and I doubt that this was time truly wasted. Although some people can get by for a while without it, becoming intimately familiar with the command line is extremely valuable. Also, although this is by no means a requirement for being an effective programmer, most good programmers I know use a traditional text editor such as emacs or vim. I agree. I think the prime takeaway is do what you need to do to solve a problem and then most of these things that the OP described came organically for me: I started on Windows, learned programming via Python, used a wide variety of text editors. Eventually I grew dissatisfied by the tools windows provided me and installed Linux. I spent many hours debugging weird weird issues with my then laptop, until one issue (a kernel bug? I think...) forced me to abandon that laptop and switch to a thinkpad. When I started my first software job my coworkers recommended vim to me. After I used it for a while, I began to become fond of its key bindings so now I'm using sublime with vintageous and just straight up vim if necessary for my development. Along the way, I've learned unix tool sets, dealt with init system, know how to find and interpret logs in a reasonable manner, figured out where to get help from people if needed, and so forth. The experience from this is invaluable to me when looking at a problem and being able to quickly identify at least where the problem is coming from based on what I've seen in the past. At the end of the day it all depends on what you're interested in and what problems you have/need to solve. I'm interested in the stuff I've done, so I found it to be a valuable exercise (albeit some headbanging every now and then). If someone is only interested in doing iOS development or Windows development. They might find the things I've fiddled around with to be not useful, and I think they would be right.
ryanolsonx 12y ago
I can definitely recommend your key point in the article: focus. It is easy today to lose focus since there are so many different frameworks and programming languages. Even if you just focus on Javascript, there are so many different frameworks here (ex. angular.js, ember.js, react.js) that it's easy get distracted and get to a point where you are only familiar with each a little bit. Great article.
onion2k 12y ago
This is why having a mentor/tutor is important - if you can focus for months on the right things you'll learn quickly. Focusing on the wrong things means a lot of that effort is wasted.
vnagpal 12y ago
i am still struggling with this problem, but great article and thanks for sharing.
notto11 12y ago
The overall message of this post is great, I've wasted plenty of time learning a shallow amount of "cool" tools. One thing I wish I knew starting out was how to create a basic VM. I shudder to think of all the time wasted thinking I was a sysadmin genius for dual booting Linux and later doing something stupid to my hard drive. VMs give me my Linux environment without the pain from those moments when I think to myself "maybe I want to be a kernel developer."
ericcumbee 12y ago
Really good advise. All mistakes that I seem to make repeatedly. I've gotten started trying to learn one thing and then jumped over to something else (i.e. node or rails) because it was what the cool kids were doing.
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bswen 12y ago
I've worked as the main developer and designer at an online publication using Drupal, then WordPress, among many other duties including communications and social media. I learned enough PHP and HTML/CSS/jQuery to write custom themes and a couple custom plugins. Recently I started working a side project as a technical cofounder (called SpareChair) and have been working with a design/dev shop to build the site with Rails. The TeaLeaf Academy has nailed the tough problem of learning to code with Ruby and Rails online. It's a Goldilocks combo of written and video tutorials and exercises, weekly live sessions and nearly instant responses to questions from students, the founders and TAs in their project forums. It's focused on producing a coder ready to sit in that dev bullpen and hang with everyone from day one of the job and accomplishes that goal. And it's very affordable, the ROI is amazing. Anyone looking to get into Ruby and Rails should check it out.
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edw519 12y ago
A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Fix Teeth. My own. How a reasonably balanced individual nearly went insane I was just a guy in a suit in an office with a vague healthcare idea. Then I decided to learn to fix teeth. I overheard some guy at a happy hour bragging about how easily he was able to automate his overbite by using a technique called "4 Handed Dentristry". I thought, "huh, 4 Handed Dentistry." I went home, googled it, and within 15 seconds, I was working through a random 4 Handed Dentistry tutorial. A week later, I went to my first dentalspace meeting. Everyone was talking about techniques like orthodontics, endodontics, and maxillofacial surgery. There was so much to learn. I borrowed three O'reilly books and got about 50 pages into each of them. Most dentistry books start off nice and easy before making big assumptions about your prior knowledge. A friend told me I should get good at drilling, and gave me his drill bits. I spent a few hours learning basic foot controls so I could further configure it. Then some guy walked by and saw me drilling. "Why are you drilling?" he asked me. "Don't you know lasers are better?" "Hm. Lasers." So I started memorizing dozens of laser shortcuts. Most arguments about restoration techniques are what dentists call "religious wars" - rooted more in historical differences than practical merit. At the time, it seemed reasonable to think that the faster I could drill, the faster I could fix teeth. I switched to a hydraulic drillset because, hey, it was objectively the most efficient method a dentist could use. Can you count how many letters, numbers and teeth are in their original oral positions? I'll give you a hint - it's in the low single digits. On the days I could actually get my netbook to successfully boot DentalCAD - and that I was able to drill more than 10 teeth per minute - I studied oral surgery by working through books and Udacity courses. After 7 months of grueling self-study and going to dental events, I landed my first Dental HMO job... You kinda get the idea by now? I dunno, I think what we do is every bit as professional as dentistry. So why don't posts like OP's seem as absurd as mine? [UPDATE: For those of you who have suggested that programmers don't have others' well-being in their hands, actually quite a few of us have, just not as directly as dentists. We are a profession and we do do important work. A few examples in an old post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882620]
- thekingofspain 12y ago
  Perhaps because you can learn to code without several years of intense schooling. The bar to entry is significantly lower.
arenaninja 12y ago
Focus is hard, but it's great that you learned this in under a year. I still have issues with focus now and then. Like when I decided that I was gonna spend 2 hours after work for a week on new tech and decided to try and pick up clojure... except that I'd never used a lisp, and after a myriad of compiler errors that I was plowing through, I eventually gave up and I know no more clojure today than I did then. In the meantime, I passively continue to improve on those things that I do know (PHP/Python/JS). I had the same issue with emacs/vim and while I use vim now, I don't consider myself a vim power user Lastly, the OS... I started with Ubuntu, wasted a week trying to get CentOS minimal up and running (I couldn't), ran with Kubuntu and have used it for about a year. Fedora is growing on me right now since I just spent the past week downloading/destroying/upgrading VMs, but I think that was more trying to find the right flavor of Linux for what I need than anything else (and with Faience theme, GNOME 3 is pretty good, although slow in a VirtualBox VM since you can't have more than 256VRAM)
foopod 12y ago
As important as it is to have expertise and proficiency in a single skill, I also believe that the more diverse your knowledge base the easier it is to pick up new things when you need to. But maybe I am just trying to make excuses for myself, maybe if I learn a new language/framework/IDE every month I will get better at learning new languages/frameworks/IDEs.
scarygliders 12y ago
For the past year I've been learning to code in Python. My basic methodology was this; I had come up with an idea for a niche product - I reckoned at the time that something like this would sell. All I needed to do was to code it up - at the time I had been reading about Python and had tentatively prodded and poked it as I wanted to find out why a lot of my acquaintences were always scoffing at this language... "I friggin' hate whitespace!" seemed to be the number one reason for not bothering with it, which was an instant reason for ME to get to know it as I'm the kind of guy who likes to see what all the fuss is about. So I had an idea, and I had chosen the language to learn and implement the idea in. That was the easy part. The hard part was to learn enough Python in order to implement it. I bascially started off with nothing and worked my way up from there by asking "How do I do X with Python?" I knew in my head what the program should be and what it should look like - "it should be a GUI", for example. I'd already used the Gtk bindings for python, but had gone off Gtk (as I've written before in a post on HN). So I decided to give Qt a try. The answer to that is to either use PyQT or PySide. I decided on PySide as I couldn't afford the PyQt commercial license (I want to sell my application after all, and my budget is next to nothing). After a while, I was getting used to how Qt Designer works for designing layouts. Next question was "How do I get the GUI widgets to send signals to my Python code?" followed shortly after by "How do I see signals from dynamically created tab widgets?" - I ended up both asking AND answering my own question on StackOverflow. ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17344805/how-to-see-signals-from-qwidgets-inside-dynamically-created-qtabwidget-pages/17467700#17467700 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17344805/how-to-see-signa...) And so as the days, weeks, and months progressed, I needed to Do Things. For me it was a matter of asking the How Do I Do That question and researching the answer, then implemented it. Before I knew it, I was increasingly getting proficient in Python, in Qt, in parsing configuration files using ConfigParser, in loading and saving files, in using QtWebkit in sneaky ways so I can display my company's animated logo using CSS. And so on. Then I needed a web site. So it took me 4 months to learn enough Django to go implement a basic site. That site and the product I recently launched. ( https://xrdpconfigurator.com https://xrdpconfigurator.com ) - that's all done in Python, including the application - which was converted to C via Cython then compiled to object code after that. [ And now I've learned another important lesson after all that time and effort - no one seems interested in my product - perhaps I should have open sourced it and asked for donations instead ;) Or perhaps I just need to patiently market the thing better. Or perhaps it is just TOO niche! ]
gcv 12y ago
There's a difference between learning computation (how to make a computer help you solve problems), and all the bullshit you have to do to build software (especially for other people). The former involves timeless concepts. The latter is full of fads and arguments over tools, broken dependencies and configuration nightmares. The author hasn't actually learned that, yet — he just started working with people who standardized their tool chain for some semblance of simplicity.
cranklin 12y ago
The problem is that crash-course developers are too satisfied with just making something work and most online tutorials are focused on language syntax. If you're learning to code, great for you... but I'd be scared to be part of your team, maintaining your code.
- TillE 12y ago
  Yeah. There's a huge difference between learning "how to code", and how to actually design good software. Lots of a focus on the former, almost none on the latter.
  - twic 12y ago
    I'll cut the young 'uns some slack here. You need to learn how to assemble curly brackets and semicolons and whatnot into a machine that actually does something before you can learn how to design machines. The art of design is the difficult and important part, but it's impossible to learn it before learning the basics of construction.
cylinder 12y ago
How did you land job interviews after being self-taught? I'm doing the same right now, but I assume I need to complete some sort of bootcamp or what not in order to actually land an entry level job as a web developer. How do you get noticed when you don't have formal experience?
- JamesSwift 12y ago
  Have something to show. I don't know what technologies/languages you have experience in and/or are looking to interview in, but having a single example of a fully completed app/webapp will get you to the interview portion in a fair number of places.
josephjrobison 12y ago
Thanks so much for this, been learning and failing with some decent wins for years. Any time there's a clear, focused guide for learning to code I get inspired again.
jreed91 12y ago
The author makes a great point and something I've been struggling with. We have so many great tools and with tech constantly improving it makes it hard to focus on a single topic area. Personally, I've gone through so many tutorials on so many different languages and frameworks (Obj-C, javascript, python, ruby, etc etc etc) but have never really focused on a specific stack. I think the most important for any new developer is to choose an area like web development or ios programming and focus on the fundamentals of programming. It's just like learning a foreign language, you're never going to be able to speak fluently until you do it everyday for months or years.
michaelvkpdx 12y ago
Great article and observations. It's always good to see what this field looks like from a newbies' eyes. If it only it were so simple as keeping a small tool set and a dev team committed to it. You can certainly build a business from scratch with a small toolset. But as the business adapts to customers, you always start to find things that customers want that the tools do not support. In initial dev, you don't necessarily care, but when you're live, it's better to implement than say 'no' to executive management and sales in most (not all) cases. Once you modify the tools a bit to support the unique business, you're no longer able to keep new developers focused on a small toolset, because you've customized. New devs may not agree and may look for ways to work around the customizations. Soon, you have a unique codebase that is valuable- central- to the business, and your changes have crept in to the point that off-the-shelf devs and tools and upgrades don't work. Now you're in maintenance mode. Code schools don't teach maintenance, but it is the lifeblood of the software business. Developers avoid maintenance jobs. They try to find new, greenfield work. That's why we end up with so many disposable business models, 3 year dev-to-acquisition cycles, and ridiculous amounts of abandoned code. Maintenance is hard. Much harder than development. But it's much more important. Anyone can launch an app that builds a business. Not everyone can adapt and grow that business with code changes that require getting out of the dev comfort zone. Code schools don't teach this because they don't want to expose aspiring coders who just want to get rich to the grimy dirty details of a real profession. But ask yourself this- would we have cars and highways if all we trained were new car designers (not mechanics or road builders)?
guncheck 12y ago
This was a really good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks!
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
I'd spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over things as trivial as missing parenthesis. Yet this illustrates a very important thing that most proponents of "learning to code" neglect entirely. Writing code isn't an isolated black box. To write code is to interact with the extremely entangled software environments that we have cumulatively been building up for over 60 years now. Anything beyond Fibonacci sequences will require you to spill out into lots and lots of domain-specific areas and subdisciplines. A proficient programmer in general will also need at least basic skills in system administration. To build a real useful application intersects with areas such as network protocols (which is immeasurably vast, depending on what layer you pick and how much you abstract), widget toolkits (and the wider quandaries of computer graphics, windowing, displays, etc.), cryptography (which pretty much intersects with most bodies of computer science), the workings of the kernel, dynamic linker (thus object files and libraries), the C library... Profiling an application will likely require you to learn some complexity theory. I/O-bound applications will require you to learn how file systems, I/O schedulers and disks work. System programming is a rabbit hole of its own, with POSIX alone just about being an independent branch. The bottom line is that programming can mean just about anything. And since programming itself is not innate, but a member of its own in the tangled web of computing, programming is thus a vast body of theory itself, a lot of which one will need to learn, unless they intend on staying frozen. Paradoxically, the more we try to make things so that people won't have to be specialized in order to use them, the more we necessitate huge drifts of specialization in the people that want to do more than cursory tasks. While picking a few components and sticking with them is probably necessary at least in professional environments to maintain sanity and interoperability, it is not very realistic for hobbyists and learners. Of course, if you just want to write macros to automate tedious tasks, you can get by with the basics. But that is pretty much something that will end up being born from necessity, and likely self-discovered rather than taught through compulsory means.
TheHypnotist 12y ago
I like this article because as someone who struggles with learning to code, I have found myself making it worse by jumping from language to language, learning the very basics of their syntax. Great, I can FizzBuzz in 4 different languages, but I still can't put together something comprehensive and useful. Reading this was kind of the reminder I needed. Focus. Pick one, become proficient (with the language and just the concepts of programming), and I guess somewhere down the road if I feel compelled try another. So for now, I'll focus.
SnacksOnAPlane 12y ago
I think the key takeaway from this is that you need to focus on learning one thing at a time. If you want to learn how to program, don't distract yourself by trying to learn some complex text editor at the same time. Use whatever plain-text editor feels easiest to you. And use the environment that's easiest to get going in. As you learn more, you'll find things that annoy you about your editor/environment. Fix those as you see fit. Eventually you'll have an environment that fits you "like a glove". It's absolutely detrimental to try to get a fully customized environment set up before you know what your workflow is going to be like. It took me years to get to my environment (tmux, vim+plugins, ack, a VirtualBox environment with a proxy). I experimented a lot. But getting "the perfect environment" was never a goal; it was just a lot of "this is annoying, there has to be a better way -> google -> environment change".
drcomputer 12y ago
I am going to be slightly rude, but only because I have done exactly the same thing. Stop trying to cram n years of experience into a blog post seeking some form of social validation. You are guaranteed to contradict yourself more than half the time. That's because you can't include all the important bits that helped you learn. Every stupid mistake is really your future best friend.
kiraken 12y ago
This blog post is an insult to every developer out there. The blogger actually want us to believe that he just overheard a conversation, went home, googled what ever he said he heard and in 7 months became an expert and landed a job. So in my professional opinion, and i do get to say that as opposed to the blogger since i actually studied Computer science and been a developer for 20 YEARS, that his story is a work of fiction, or the company that hired him is one of those startups that just hires anyone that walks in the door like most of them these days. A developer needs time not just to learn a language, trust me once you learn one you learned em all, you just need to get used to the new environment and light changes in syntax. What you need time for is to learn the LOGIC of our trade and learn how to fix errors and how to improve/optimize your code. And all of these things come with time and effort and no amount of facebook posts or reading books could teach you that.
- Sammi 12y ago
  > or the company that hired him is one of those startups that just hires anyone that walks in the door like most of them these days. Ding ding ding. You could replace startups with company though, because there are loads of companies of different ages that would hire someone with only 7 months of self study of programming. Cause the thing is that the industry is starving for software developers. Those that are not employed either live in rural areas without jobs in general, aren't trying, or are just unbelievably bad at job interviews or work overall.
  - kiraken 12y ago
    And even considering all of this i highly doubt any company that pays more than 500$ a month would hire someone with 6 months of experience. That much time is not even enough to master html and css
spain 12y ago
This actually mirrors my own experience a lot, except for a few differences. Biggest one being I haven't actually looked into employment yet. I too bounced between Vim and Emacs until recently I decided to stick with Emacs. I too switched to Dvorak, later switching to Colemak. I used a typing tutor software with which I was actually able to get up to a respectably 50-60 WPM if I remember correctly. However I eventually switched back to Qwerty after growing tired of keyboard shortcuts never working the way they were supposed to. Sure I could rebind them in my favorite editor (and even that was a pain in the ass) but each time I installed something new I'd have to do it again. One thing I am grateful for from Colemak is rebinding Caps lock to Control, what a great idea. I've also been dabbling between C, Lisp, C++, Python, Bash, and a few others, but I never really became really good at any of them. It was more than just the OPs 50-page dabble (something like 400 pages into C++ Primer) but I feel like I can relate. Sure I can write basic programs in all of them but I didn't have a "default" so to speak that I've mastered. Only recently I made the decision that Python would be that default. The reasoning behind it is simple, I already kinda knew it and it fit my use case well. I just wanted to do stuff with the language and Python makes it easy with its wealth of libraries and (in my opinion) intuitive structure. Stuff like Lisp and Haskell still have a place in my heart because of how elegant they are, but I just feel more productive in Python. That's my sort of ongoing story of getting at what I feel is the same kind of focus the OP was talking about. Now if only I could just settle on a Linux distro instead of hopping around every few months (currently messing around in Slackware, though I suspect I'd be better off switching back to Ubuntu which I was using before I switched to Slackware).
- ibebrett 12y ago
  I have been programming for 10+ years (and really more like 15 if you count being a teenager coding), and I change languages/editors/distros all the time. I have never switched keyboard layout (this honestly to me sounds like the biggest waste of time I have ever heard of). I am just saying that its not about finding some random piece of technology that you stick with forever, 90% of the time its using the right tool for the job, or contributing to something that already has momentum.
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bitwize 12y ago
I like the idea to choose one language, but... Start with Python. You're going to hear Ruby this and JavaScript that and Swift the other -- but seriously, I'm from the future. You should start with Python. It's essentially BASIC for this century: a great place to start learning the basics without being too weird. There's plenty of time and once you have those cold, you can investigate other languages, including the fun ones that have separate compilation steps and may produce segmentation faults if you're not careful.
- Sammi 12y ago
  Yeah, aren't most universities using Python for beginners now?
- twic 12y ago
  The key thing about Python is that it's really plain. It's a straightforward procedural language - values, functions, names, calls, and that's about it. It has a simple object system, and some simple functional features. The whitespace business is superficially kooky, and there is a scary amount of metaprogramming and other craziness available, but people tend not to use it. As such, it's a really useful preparation for learning other languages. If you have the basic concepts from Python, then when you learn Ruby, you just learn some syntax and the special things that make Ruby distinctive (metaprogramming, monkeypatching, ubiquitous gemmery, Rails). When you learn JavaScript, you just learn some syntax and the special things that make JavaScript distinctive (callbacks, artisanal object systems, the interplay of JS and the DOM). You never have to learn to do without some special thing you've learned to depend on, because Python has no special things. Well, that and it's incredibly easy. And it has a really strong batteries-included standard library. And it has a really friendly, helpful community. But mostly the plainness.
  - pcthrowaway 12y ago
    > the special things that make JavaScript distinctive (callbacks, artisanal object systems, the interplay of JS and the DOM) If you're coming to Javascript from pretty much any other language, prototypal inheritance is probably going to be the biggest difference in paradigm to wrap your head around.
mrpoptart 12y ago
I believe that your path didn't teach you to learn how to code, per-se, but that learning to code was a side benefit of learning how to teach yourself. Schools exist because specialization is useful, because having lots of people to help is useful, and because information is diffuse. On the bright side, once you know how to learn, learning additional things is easier, especially new things in the same field.
icarot 12y ago
The last sentence was the most important; the rest should be ignored. Have patience, perseverance, and you'll do anything. Or, converge onto interesting problems and fail gloriously; the only way to do anything of worth. The post comparing this to dentistry is precisely what I was thinking, except nowhere near as hilarious. I wish I was intelligent enough to write a Markov algorithm for logic that paralleled reasoning in such a way automatically. Thank you for that.

240 points by michaelq 12y ago

Yes.

This was one of my biggest issues, even as an experienced developer with a CS degree. I always felt a step behind since I wasn't fluent in the latest and greatest framework. All of that changed when I mentally decided to focus on one language, namely Ruby. It's amazing how much you can do with any one language even though it's not fully optimized for a specific use case you need.

bafilius 12y ago

definitely a lot of good points here

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ocb 12y ago
He meant that with regards to Node.js.

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AlexanderDhoore 12y ago

Very very good article, although the latter part is a bit too focussed on web dev and dynamic scripting languages. I personally think every programmer should know some C. Basic things like what the stack and the heap are. Edit: Ok, probably not in the case of absolute beginners, but after a year or two...

nikhilalmeida 12y ago
I think C is good to know and try if you are going through an academic program in school. For a lot of people just starting to learn to code (while juggling other responsibilities/jobs/etc), learning C upfront can be an overkill. Being able to implement your idea as soon as possible will be of utmost importance. Sure they can dabble with a little more deeper understanding of language internals and theory once they feel confident enough in the one toolset they have chosen.
BonsaiDen 12y ago
There are a whole lot of things every programmer should know because they'll have a profound impact on their code no matter how far up they sit in the abstraction chain. Even things like memory alignment and cache lines can bite you really badly if you don't know about them and order your loop the wrong way around :) Date and Time Handling, Unicode and Data Structures are also a common area for many misconceptions and sources of error. Of course nobody needs to know everything, but have a lively thirst for knowledge always helps, especially one you got over the initial confusion of learning the basics. There's just so much interesting stuff out there and a lot of it will help you improve even if you don't end up using it right away / at all. Even if you're just swimming on the surface, it's always a good thing to know at least the 1-3 meters beneath you, just in case something happens or you get stuck in some seaweed and struggle to get out on your own. I've actually made quite some good experiences with teaching people a few things about ASTs right once they started writing code, even though I only gave the some very basic lessons about how the "text" is eventually transformed, it really helped them a lot in understanding why certain text does certain things. In the end, it's always very hard to play the game successfully if you don't know the rules by which you have to play. And a little can go a long way.
- jtchang 12y ago
  Do you mind going into memory alignment and cache lines and what would be good to know? I feel like I ignore most of that unless I am coding in C. I mostly do python or Javascript so does that stuff mater when you are that high up in the tech stack?
12y ago

dkbrk 12y ago

I think the author is correct in that he tried to learn too many things at once; starting with a friendlier environment and focussing on a small number of new technologies has obvious advantages. But in some other ways, the author is too self-critical: > I'd spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over things as trivial as missing parenthesis. All these things have value, and I doubt that this was time truly wasted. Although some people can get by for a while without it, becoming intimately familiar with the command line is extremely valuable. Also, although this is by no means a requirement for being an effective programmer, most good programmers I know use a traditional text editor such as emacs or vim. Ultimately, I think the point is that expending time is an investment, and you should prioritise based on the expected future utility from your time investment. More often than not, this means finding the most important thing and putting almost all of your energy into it.

makmanalp 12y ago
This. I learned programming the "bang your head against the wall" way, and I think I'm much better for it. I'm much more familiar with the innards of my tools, operating systems and programming languages as a result, and I'm much better at debugging things and understanding what's going on when I write a certain piece of code. I also have a pretty diverse set of skills. I find that any information you pick up somewhere eventually ends up being useful elsewhere. But I'm privileged in that I wasn't ever pressured to learn, it wasn't a point where my livelihood depended on it, so that's a factor.
pwnna 12y ago
>> I'd spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over things as trivial as missing parenthesis. > All these things have value, and I doubt that this was time truly wasted. Although some people can get by for a while without it, becoming intimately familiar with the command line is extremely valuable. Also, although this is by no means a requirement for being an effective programmer, most good programmers I know use a traditional text editor such as emacs or vim. I agree. I think the prime takeaway is do what you need to do to solve a problem and then most of these things that the OP described came organically for me: I started on Windows, learned programming via Python, used a wide variety of text editors. Eventually I grew dissatisfied by the tools windows provided me and installed Linux. I spent many hours debugging weird weird issues with my then laptop, until one issue (a kernel bug? I think...) forced me to abandon that laptop and switch to a thinkpad. When I started my first software job my coworkers recommended vim to me. After I used it for a while, I began to become fond of its key bindings so now I'm using sublime with vintageous and just straight up vim if necessary for my development. Along the way, I've learned unix tool sets, dealt with init system, know how to find and interpret logs in a reasonable manner, figured out where to get help from people if needed, and so forth. The experience from this is invaluable to me when looking at a problem and being able to quickly identify at least where the problem is coming from based on what I've seen in the past. At the end of the day it all depends on what you're interested in and what problems you have/need to solve. I'm interested in the stuff I've done, so I found it to be a valuable exercise (albeit some headbanging every now and then). If someone is only interested in doing iOS development or Windows development. They might find the things I've fiddled around with to be not useful, and I think they would be right.

ryanolsonx 12y ago

I can definitely recommend your key point in the article: focus. It is easy today to lose focus since there are so many different frameworks and programming languages. Even if you just focus on Javascript, there are so many different frameworks here (ex. angular.js, ember.js, react.js) that it's easy get distracted and get to a point where you are only familiar with each a little bit. Great article.

onion2k 12y ago

This is why having a mentor/tutor is important - if you can focus for months on the right things you'll learn quickly. Focusing on the wrong things means a lot of that effort is wasted.

vnagpal 12y ago

i am still struggling with this problem, but great article and thanks for sharing.

notto11 12y ago

The overall message of this post is great, I've wasted plenty of time learning a shallow amount of "cool" tools. One thing I wish I knew starting out was how to create a basic VM. I shudder to think of all the time wasted thinking I was a sysadmin genius for dual booting Linux and later doing something stupid to my hard drive. VMs give me my Linux environment without the pain from those moments when I think to myself "maybe I want to be a kernel developer."

ericcumbee 12y ago

Really good advise. All mistakes that I seem to make repeatedly. I've gotten started trying to learn one thing and then jumped over to something else (i.e. node or rails) because it was what the cool kids were doing.

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bswen 12y ago

I've worked as the main developer and designer at an online publication using Drupal, then WordPress, among many other duties including communications and social media. I learned enough PHP and HTML/CSS/jQuery to write custom themes and a couple custom plugins. Recently I started working a side project as a technical cofounder (called SpareChair) and have been working with a design/dev shop to build the site with Rails. The TeaLeaf Academy has nailed the tough problem of learning to code with Ruby and Rails online. It's a Goldilocks combo of written and video tutorials and exercises, weekly live sessions and nearly instant responses to questions from students, the founders and TAs in their project forums. It's focused on producing a coder ready to sit in that dev bullpen and hang with everyone from day one of the job and accomplishes that goal. And it's very affordable, the ROI is amazing. Anyone looking to get into Ruby and Rails should check it out.

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edw519 12y ago

A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Fix Teeth. My own. How a reasonably balanced individual nearly went insane I was just a guy in a suit in an office with a vague healthcare idea. Then I decided to learn to fix teeth. I overheard some guy at a happy hour bragging about how easily he was able to automate his overbite by using a technique called "4 Handed Dentristry". I thought, "huh, 4 Handed Dentistry." I went home, googled it, and within 15 seconds, I was working through a random 4 Handed Dentistry tutorial. A week later, I went to my first dentalspace meeting. Everyone was talking about techniques like orthodontics, endodontics, and maxillofacial surgery. There was so much to learn. I borrowed three O'reilly books and got about 50 pages into each of them. Most dentistry books start off nice and easy before making big assumptions about your prior knowledge. A friend told me I should get good at drilling, and gave me his drill bits. I spent a few hours learning basic foot controls so I could further configure it. Then some guy walked by and saw me drilling. "Why are you drilling?" he asked me. "Don't you know lasers are better?" "Hm. Lasers." So I started memorizing dozens of laser shortcuts. Most arguments about restoration techniques are what dentists call "religious wars" - rooted more in historical differences than practical merit. At the time, it seemed reasonable to think that the faster I could drill, the faster I could fix teeth. I switched to a hydraulic drillset because, hey, it was objectively the most efficient method a dentist could use. Can you count how many letters, numbers and teeth are in their original oral positions? I'll give you a hint - it's in the low single digits. On the days I could actually get my netbook to successfully boot DentalCAD - and that I was able to drill more than 10 teeth per minute - I studied oral surgery by working through books and Udacity courses. After 7 months of grueling self-study and going to dental events, I landed my first Dental HMO job... You kinda get the idea by now? I dunno, I think what we do is every bit as professional as dentistry. So why don't posts like OP's seem as absurd as mine? [UPDATE: For those of you who have suggested that programmers don't have others' well-being in their hands, actually quite a few of us have, just not as directly as dentists. We are a profession and we do do important work. A few examples in an old post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2882620]

thekingofspain 12y ago
Perhaps because you can learn to code without several years of intense schooling. The bar to entry is significantly lower.

arenaninja 12y ago

Focus is hard, but it's great that you learned this in under a year. I still have issues with focus now and then. Like when I decided that I was gonna spend 2 hours after work for a week on new tech and decided to try and pick up clojure... except that I'd never used a lisp, and after a myriad of compiler errors that I was plowing through, I eventually gave up and I know no more clojure today than I did then. In the meantime, I passively continue to improve on those things that I do know (PHP/Python/JS). I had the same issue with emacs/vim and while I use vim now, I don't consider myself a vim power user Lastly, the OS... I started with Ubuntu, wasted a week trying to get CentOS minimal up and running (I couldn't), ran with Kubuntu and have used it for about a year. Fedora is growing on me right now since I just spent the past week downloading/destroying/upgrading VMs, but I think that was more trying to find the right flavor of Linux for what I need than anything else (and with Faience theme, GNOME 3 is pretty good, although slow in a VirtualBox VM since you can't have more than 256VRAM)

foopod 12y ago

As important as it is to have expertise and proficiency in a single skill, I also believe that the more diverse your knowledge base the easier it is to pick up new things when you need to. But maybe I am just trying to make excuses for myself, maybe if I learn a new language/framework/IDE every month I will get better at learning new languages/frameworks/IDEs.

scarygliders 12y ago

For the past year I've been learning to code in Python. My basic methodology was this; I had come up with an idea for a niche product - I reckoned at the time that something like this would sell. All I needed to do was to code it up - at the time I had been reading about Python and had tentatively prodded and poked it as I wanted to find out why a lot of my acquaintences were always scoffing at this language... "I friggin' hate whitespace!" seemed to be the number one reason for not bothering with it, which was an instant reason for ME to get to know it as I'm the kind of guy who likes to see what all the fuss is about. So I had an idea, and I had chosen the language to learn and implement the idea in. That was the easy part. The hard part was to learn enough Python in order to implement it. I bascially started off with nothing and worked my way up from there by asking "How do I do X with Python?" I knew in my head what the program should be and what it should look like - "it should be a GUI", for example. I'd already used the Gtk bindings for python, but had gone off Gtk (as I've written before in a post on HN). So I decided to give Qt a try. The answer to that is to either use PyQT or PySide. I decided on PySide as I couldn't afford the PyQt commercial license (I want to sell my application after all, and my budget is next to nothing). After a while, I was getting used to how Qt Designer works for designing layouts. Next question was "How do I get the GUI widgets to send signals to my Python code?" followed shortly after by "How do I see signals from dynamically created tab widgets?" - I ended up both asking AND answering my own question on StackOverflow. ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17344805/how-to-see-signals-from-qwidgets-inside-dynamically-created-qtabwidget-pages/17467700#17467700 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17344805/how-to-see-signa...) And so as the days, weeks, and months progressed, I needed to Do Things. For me it was a matter of asking the How Do I Do That question and researching the answer, then implemented it. Before I knew it, I was increasingly getting proficient in Python, in Qt, in parsing configuration files using ConfigParser, in loading and saving files, in using QtWebkit in sneaky ways so I can display my company's animated logo using CSS. And so on. Then I needed a web site. So it took me 4 months to learn enough Django to go implement a basic site. That site and the product I recently launched. ( https://xrdpconfigurator.com https://xrdpconfigurator.com ) - that's all done in Python, including the application - which was converted to C via Cython then compiled to object code after that. [ And now I've learned another important lesson after all that time and effort - no one seems interested in my product - perhaps I should have open sourced it and asked for donations instead ;) Or perhaps I just need to patiently market the thing better. Or perhaps it is just TOO niche! ]

gcv 12y ago

There's a difference between learning computation (how to make a computer help you solve problems), and all the bullshit you have to do to build software (especially for other people). The former involves timeless concepts. The latter is full of fads and arguments over tools, broken dependencies and configuration nightmares. The author hasn't actually learned that, yet — he just started working with people who standardized their tool chain for some semblance of simplicity.

cranklin 12y ago

The problem is that crash-course developers are too satisfied with just making something work and most online tutorials are focused on language syntax. If you're learning to code, great for you... but I'd be scared to be part of your team, maintaining your code.

TillE 12y ago
Yeah. There's a huge difference between learning "how to code", and how to actually design good software. Lots of a focus on the former, almost none on the latter.
- twic 12y ago
  I'll cut the young 'uns some slack here. You need to learn how to assemble curly brackets and semicolons and whatnot into a machine that actually does something before you can learn how to design machines. The art of design is the difficult and important part, but it's impossible to learn it before learning the basics of construction.

cylinder 12y ago

How did you land job interviews after being self-taught? I'm doing the same right now, but I assume I need to complete some sort of bootcamp or what not in order to actually land an entry level job as a web developer. How do you get noticed when you don't have formal experience?

JamesSwift 12y ago
Have something to show. I don't know what technologies/languages you have experience in and/or are looking to interview in, but having a single example of a fully completed app/webapp will get you to the interview portion in a fair number of places.

josephjrobison 12y ago

Thanks so much for this, been learning and failing with some decent wins for years. Any time there's a clear, focused guide for learning to code I get inspired again.

jreed91 12y ago

The author makes a great point and something I've been struggling with. We have so many great tools and with tech constantly improving it makes it hard to focus on a single topic area. Personally, I've gone through so many tutorials on so many different languages and frameworks (Obj-C, javascript, python, ruby, etc etc etc) but have never really focused on a specific stack. I think the most important for any new developer is to choose an area like web development or ios programming and focus on the fundamentals of programming. It's just like learning a foreign language, you're never going to be able to speak fluently until you do it everyday for months or years.

michaelvkpdx 12y ago

Great article and observations. It's always good to see what this field looks like from a newbies' eyes. If it only it were so simple as keeping a small tool set and a dev team committed to it. You can certainly build a business from scratch with a small toolset. But as the business adapts to customers, you always start to find things that customers want that the tools do not support. In initial dev, you don't necessarily care, but when you're live, it's better to implement than say 'no' to executive management and sales in most (not all) cases. Once you modify the tools a bit to support the unique business, you're no longer able to keep new developers focused on a small toolset, because you've customized. New devs may not agree and may look for ways to work around the customizations. Soon, you have a unique codebase that is valuable- central- to the business, and your changes have crept in to the point that off-the-shelf devs and tools and upgrades don't work. Now you're in maintenance mode. Code schools don't teach maintenance, but it is the lifeblood of the software business. Developers avoid maintenance jobs. They try to find new, greenfield work. That's why we end up with so many disposable business models, 3 year dev-to-acquisition cycles, and ridiculous amounts of abandoned code. Maintenance is hard. Much harder than development. But it's much more important. Anyone can launch an app that builds a business. Not everyone can adapt and grow that business with code changes that require getting out of the dev comfort zone. Code schools don't teach this because they don't want to expose aspiring coders who just want to get rich to the grimy dirty details of a real profession. But ask yourself this- would we have cars and highways if all we trained were new car designers (not mechanics or road builders)?

guncheck 12y ago

This was a really good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks!

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

I'd spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over things as trivial as missing parenthesis. Yet this illustrates a very important thing that most proponents of "learning to code" neglect entirely. Writing code isn't an isolated black box. To write code is to interact with the extremely entangled software environments that we have cumulatively been building up for over 60 years now. Anything beyond Fibonacci sequences will require you to spill out into lots and lots of domain-specific areas and subdisciplines. A proficient programmer in general will also need at least basic skills in system administration. To build a real useful application intersects with areas such as network protocols (which is immeasurably vast, depending on what layer you pick and how much you abstract), widget toolkits (and the wider quandaries of computer graphics, windowing, displays, etc.), cryptography (which pretty much intersects with most bodies of computer science), the workings of the kernel, dynamic linker (thus object files and libraries), the C library... Profiling an application will likely require you to learn some complexity theory. I/O-bound applications will require you to learn how file systems, I/O schedulers and disks work. System programming is a rabbit hole of its own, with POSIX alone just about being an independent branch. The bottom line is that programming can mean just about anything. And since programming itself is not innate, but a member of its own in the tangled web of computing, programming is thus a vast body of theory itself, a lot of which one will need to learn, unless they intend on staying frozen. Paradoxically, the more we try to make things so that people won't have to be specialized in order to use them, the more we necessitate huge drifts of specialization in the people that want to do more than cursory tasks. While picking a few components and sticking with them is probably necessary at least in professional environments to maintain sanity and interoperability, it is not very realistic for hobbyists and learners. Of course, if you just want to write macros to automate tedious tasks, you can get by with the basics. But that is pretty much something that will end up being born from necessity, and likely self-discovered rather than taught through compulsory means.

TheHypnotist 12y ago

I like this article because as someone who struggles with learning to code, I have found myself making it worse by jumping from language to language, learning the very basics of their syntax. Great, I can FizzBuzz in 4 different languages, but I still can't put together something comprehensive and useful. Reading this was kind of the reminder I needed. Focus. Pick one, become proficient (with the language and just the concepts of programming), and I guess somewhere down the road if I feel compelled try another. So for now, I'll focus.

SnacksOnAPlane 12y ago

I think the key takeaway from this is that you need to focus on learning one thing at a time. If you want to learn how to program, don't distract yourself by trying to learn some complex text editor at the same time. Use whatever plain-text editor feels easiest to you. And use the environment that's easiest to get going in. As you learn more, you'll find things that annoy you about your editor/environment. Fix those as you see fit. Eventually you'll have an environment that fits you "like a glove". It's absolutely detrimental to try to get a fully customized environment set up before you know what your workflow is going to be like. It took me years to get to my environment (tmux, vim+plugins, ack, a VirtualBox environment with a proxy). I experimented a lot. But getting "the perfect environment" was never a goal; it was just a lot of "this is annoying, there has to be a better way -> google -> environment change".

drcomputer 12y ago

I am going to be slightly rude, but only because I have done exactly the same thing. Stop trying to cram n years of experience into a blog post seeking some form of social validation. You are guaranteed to contradict yourself more than half the time. That's because you can't include all the important bits that helped you learn. Every stupid mistake is really your future best friend.

kiraken 12y ago

This blog post is an insult to every developer out there. The blogger actually want us to believe that he just overheard a conversation, went home, googled what ever he said he heard and in 7 months became an expert and landed a job. So in my professional opinion, and i do get to say that as opposed to the blogger since i actually studied Computer science and been a developer for 20 YEARS, that his story is a work of fiction, or the company that hired him is one of those startups that just hires anyone that walks in the door like most of them these days. A developer needs time not just to learn a language, trust me once you learn one you learned em all, you just need to get used to the new environment and light changes in syntax. What you need time for is to learn the LOGIC of our trade and learn how to fix errors and how to improve/optimize your code. And all of these things come with time and effort and no amount of facebook posts or reading books could teach you that.

Sammi 12y ago
> or the company that hired him is one of those startups that just hires anyone that walks in the door like most of them these days. Ding ding ding. You could replace startups with company though, because there are loads of companies of different ages that would hire someone with only 7 months of self study of programming. Cause the thing is that the industry is starving for software developers. Those that are not employed either live in rural areas without jobs in general, aren't trying, or are just unbelievably bad at job interviews or work overall.
- kiraken 12y ago
  And even considering all of this i highly doubt any company that pays more than 500$ a month would hire someone with 6 months of experience. That much time is not even enough to master html and css

spain 12y ago

This actually mirrors my own experience a lot, except for a few differences. Biggest one being I haven't actually looked into employment yet. I too bounced between Vim and Emacs until recently I decided to stick with Emacs. I too switched to Dvorak, later switching to Colemak. I used a typing tutor software with which I was actually able to get up to a respectably 50-60 WPM if I remember correctly. However I eventually switched back to Qwerty after growing tired of keyboard shortcuts never working the way they were supposed to. Sure I could rebind them in my favorite editor (and even that was a pain in the ass) but each time I installed something new I'd have to do it again. One thing I am grateful for from Colemak is rebinding Caps lock to Control, what a great idea. I've also been dabbling between C, Lisp, C++, Python, Bash, and a few others, but I never really became really good at any of them. It was more than just the OPs 50-page dabble (something like 400 pages into C++ Primer) but I feel like I can relate. Sure I can write basic programs in all of them but I didn't have a "default" so to speak that I've mastered. Only recently I made the decision that Python would be that default. The reasoning behind it is simple, I already kinda knew it and it fit my use case well. I just wanted to do stuff with the language and Python makes it easy with its wealth of libraries and (in my opinion) intuitive structure. Stuff like Lisp and Haskell still have a place in my heart because of how elegant they are, but I just feel more productive in Python. That's my sort of ongoing story of getting at what I feel is the same kind of focus the OP was talking about. Now if only I could just settle on a Linux distro instead of hopping around every few months (currently messing around in Slackware, though I suspect I'd be better off switching back to Ubuntu which I was using before I switched to Slackware).

ibebrett 12y ago
I have been programming for 10+ years (and really more like 15 if you count being a teenager coding), and I change languages/editors/distros all the time. I have never switched keyboard layout (this honestly to me sounds like the biggest waste of time I have ever heard of). I am just saying that its not about finding some random piece of technology that you stick with forever, 90% of the time its using the right tool for the job, or contributing to something that already has momentum.
- 12y ago

bitwize 12y ago

I like the idea to choose one language, but... Start with Python. You're going to hear Ruby this and JavaScript that and Swift the other -- but seriously, I'm from the future. You should start with Python. It's essentially BASIC for this century: a great place to start learning the basics without being too weird. There's plenty of time and once you have those cold, you can investigate other languages, including the fun ones that have separate compilation steps and may produce segmentation faults if you're not careful.

Sammi 12y ago
Yeah, aren't most universities using Python for beginners now?
twic 12y ago
The key thing about Python is that it's really plain. It's a straightforward procedural language - values, functions, names, calls, and that's about it. It has a simple object system, and some simple functional features. The whitespace business is superficially kooky, and there is a scary amount of metaprogramming and other craziness available, but people tend not to use it. As such, it's a really useful preparation for learning other languages. If you have the basic concepts from Python, then when you learn Ruby, you just learn some syntax and the special things that make Ruby distinctive (metaprogramming, monkeypatching, ubiquitous gemmery, Rails). When you learn JavaScript, you just learn some syntax and the special things that make JavaScript distinctive (callbacks, artisanal object systems, the interplay of JS and the DOM). You never have to learn to do without some special thing you've learned to depend on, because Python has no special things. Well, that and it's incredibly easy. And it has a really strong batteries-included standard library. And it has a really friendly, helpful community. But mostly the plainness.
- pcthrowaway 12y ago
  > the special things that make JavaScript distinctive (callbacks, artisanal object systems, the interplay of JS and the DOM) If you're coming to Javascript from pretty much any other language, prototypal inheritance is probably going to be the biggest difference in paradigm to wrap your head around.

mrpoptart 12y ago

I believe that your path didn't teach you to learn how to code, per-se, but that learning to code was a side benefit of learning how to teach yourself. Schools exist because specialization is useful, because having lots of people to help is useful, and because information is diffuse. On the bright side, once you know how to learn, learning additional things is easier, especially new things in the same field.

icarot 12y ago

The last sentence was the most important; the rest should be ignored. Have patience, perseverance, and you'll do anything. Or, converge onto interesting problems and fail gloriously; the only way to do anything of worth. The post comparing this to dentistry is precisely what I was thinking, except nowhere near as hilarious. I wish I was intelligent enough to write a Markov algorithm for logic that paralleled reasoning in such a way automatically. Thank you for that.