Why People fail to learn Programming

Whether you are switching your career or starting to learn to code, there are a few pointers to keep in mind while you are at it. These are different learning strategies I have come up with throughout my journey as a programmer and the lessons I have learned by looking at the outcome of me vs my friends. The reason I think that these are so important for the people who are starting is that I have seen a lot of people who are working hard. They are spending a lot of time, sacrificing their mental energy on learning tutorials, and watching videos. They are putting so much effort into these things to learn but they are not doing anything more than that. The reality is that hoping is not the right way to cater to this situation. You have to be systematic and strategic in your game plan. If you sit for 8 hours watching YouTube videos. No matter how good that tutorial is, you wouldn’t be very efficient unless you follow this simple yet comprehensive set of rules.

With that being said, let’s not waste any more time and dive right into it.

Create projects and stop with the endless tutorials: tutorial hell is where you’re only good at doing tutorials and not expanding your skills out of that. The right way is to watch a tutorial, and about midway through start to make a project which is slightly different from the conventional “To Do” app. You might say that this is kind of obvious but most of the people who start to code make this very mistake which slows a man down. Now it goes without saying that you should get your programming basics checked out before you start with your projects. You might have many difficulties while doing it but remaining consistent and reading the relevant documentation can accelerate your learning towards the concept and learn to solve problems while you are at it. I am telling you from experience because when I started to learn JavaScript, I went through a lot of tutorials for 3 months, but by the end of it, I wasn’t even able to create a simple practical project. Then I started looking for projects which enabled me to put the pieces together. You haven’t learned anything without writing your program and without any help.

Develop your problem-solving skills: You might think that being a developer means being proficient in a certain programming language. Now that is true but to a certain extent. Being good in a language is not enough to be a good programmer. A programmer is more of a problem solver and your employer looks for the way you approach a problem, analyze it, break it down and attack it with the right skill set to ultimately eradicate that mistake. So don’t hesitate when you face a problem in your early stages. These are just stepping stones that would slowly take you higher and higher in your respective career to becoming a better programmer.

Learn collaboratively with your friends: learning with your friends is one of the best ways you can learn a new skill. The reason behind this principle is that you are held accountable in the eyes of your friend which constantly creates pressure to continue to learn. When you make a pact with your friend to learn together, you more often than not help your friend to overcome a problem they are having and they will do the same for you. People end up paying a lot of money for colleges and institutes where they are not paying for the information, they are getting but for the like-minded individuals there are. These institutions are just classrooms and libraries with books staring at you. Try to get into the communities available on stack overflow, Reddit, open communities like google developer student club, and Microsoft learn ambassador program where you would find a talented pool of individuals. At the end of the day, what you want is to learn, and this path smooths out most of the hurdles in your way.

Read out what other people are doing: when you start fresh into something you would be bombarded with the information. You would discover a lot of libraries, frameworks, and packages which would end up overwhelming you. According to a few statists, this is one of the leading factors of why people tend to lose interest in coding. With the abundance of information over the internet to find the best way of coding is to read other people’s code. When you start programming, you don’t know what topic is important and which one is not, but once you get deeper into the subject, you realize that a lot of those packages are not that important. Reading other people’s code is the best way to understand how people solve problems, as a programming professional, you tend to read more code than write code.

Don’t waste your time making notes when you initially start: contrary to your other academics, people often tend to make notes. The reality is that you are going to reuse a lot of that code throughout your developer journey and you wouldn’t even open your notes to go through them. More often than not you look up something on the Internet as it is way faster to Google about a function rather than opening up a book, browse the index and go read the whole documentation. Just focus on the task you are currently doing and make sure to understand everything being told to you by your instructor.

Jack of all the trades, master of none:

“Don’t be an inch deep and yard wide. Be an inch wide but a yard deep.”

When you enter the tech world, you would see people excelling in their fields. One of your friends just got a software engineering job at Google, while the other one scored a high-paying package as a DevOps engineer. Your second cousin is cashing in big checks through digital marketing and your brother is working in a tech startup as a data analyst.

When you are young, people tell you to have exposure to as many fields as you can to see what the world looks like but you have to make sure to do it promptly. Your employer would choose you on your ability to solve a problem. Focus on picking up a niche that you tend to enjoy and dive right into it. Look up for inspiration on what people are doing in that particular field.

If you are currently learning to code, I hope this article would help you.

These are the traps you should avoid at all costs and if you get around these you would be in pretty good shape. Let me know about your thoughts and if you got more tips you would like to share make sure to mention them down below.

Thanks for your time ,and

Happy Coding