What i've been working on the last few years is kind of disciplining myself to actually do things rather than talking about it, i've definitely got better because I was really stuck just watching coding videos a few years ago, but what else I'm actually struggling with is growing up into this mindset that if you want money you have to work hard for it, money doesn't come easy.

All over the internet there's always easy money making clickbait, everyone thinks when there young that you can be lazy, as long as you choose the right career path it's gonna be easy, but it's not, I don't think it ever is, or is it? What was so offputting about coding at first was how hard it seemed, will it always stay this way? I guess you just have to toughen up and stop expecting it to be easy, although it probably is hardest when your trying to code your first things.

Will it become easier? I just think I always get stuck when I have to put some effort in, but then again i'd rather just not do something if it was always really hard and confusing. I look at these pro developers and think I could never be like that.

Edited November 15, 20196 yr by NullDrone

No things get harder as you progress as you take on more challenging things.  I'm not sure what you mean by "being able to code" it's not a black and white thing where you go past a point and suddenly you can do it.

You'll gradually get better from knowing zero the more you do it.  But the more you learn the more you realise how much else is out there that you don't know.

I've been doing this professionally now for 6 years and I have a big list of stuff I'd like to learn when I get time.  That list grows faster than I get stuff done.  For the most part I learn new things as and when they're needed on the job.  I pick up a ticket that I'm unsure of and I'll spike out some ideas, ask others, Google etc etc until I've figured it out.  Often when I have a good idea how to solve it I'll break the problem down, sometimes this comes earlier.

The gist is that it's rare coming into a problem as a software engineer that you'll have all the answers upfront.  A good engineer has a strong handle on the fundamentals so can put some of those together to solve parts of a problem then can google and ask others.  Teams often have people who specialise in certain areas too so it's common to pair up with those people in order to knowledge share.


I think if you're putting significant free time into studying and you're still not job ready after 1-2 years then you need to seriously take a look at what you're doing.  Anybody who doesn't have severe learning difficulties should be at the right level to work as a junior developer by this stage.  Unless the courses they are taking are terrible, out of date etc.  What are you using to learn?  What tech stack are you learning?
Most bootcamps these days focus on JavaScript (ES6), React, Testing etc.  We hire from Northcoders who's grads are job ready in as little as 12 weeks. https://northcoders.com

Courses will only get you so far. What I have found to be useful is to do just enough of the course to get me comfortable and familiar, and to try and build something real-world from there. It's only when you're building for yourself that things will stick, otherwise you're just following along and it's incredibly easy to forget everything. It's going to be tough though, this is the hard way of doing things, but it's very hard to cement concepts that you haven't applied yourself.

For example, for the last few weeks I have been getting familiar with how GraphQL works behind the scenes, and how it allows you to query data. I worked on a small API project to better understand everything and worked incrementally on each thing until it was working. I got stuck on this several times, but you eventually get past it, and that better improves your understanding because you're having to really look into each part of the process and debug it.

The important thing is not to build something overly ambitious, just something small that you can get a lot of quick wins from and progress incrementally. For my API project I just wanted to have an API where I could query a list of posts, a list of authors and the relationships between them. That was my goal all along and I didn't need anything more than that to understand how GraphQL forms relationships between data. If I progressed well enough I had a backlog of features I could add, such as editing / adding new posts, and authentication using tokens.

This is where some courses fall short, because they often give you too large of a project to build and throw too many concepts at you. I have found it better to build smaller projects, broken down into smaller tasks, that can get you to a stage where you're comfortable taking on something larger.

None of this is straight-forward, even as your experience level grows. You're generally trying to push yourself further all the time and you should be wary when things start getting too easy, being outside of your comfort zone will push you further than continuously taking the easy option.

I think it's a mix TBH Jack, I've seen many courses that keep things super useful but don't reflect how things work in the real world if that makes sense?

I like a course that introduces a concept and you build something super simple then quickly move onto doing this in a real world setting.  TDD courses are terrible for this which is why most engineers I meet write horrible unit tests that test functions in isolation which is rarely what you'd want in an application.  Those kinds of tests lock you into implementations and make future changes really hard.

So I think it's finding a balance when designing a course.  The TLDR is just keep building and get comfortable with the fact that you're never going to know everything - not even close.  The idea is to get a solid foundation and start building on that I think.

9 hours ago, rbrtsmith said:

I think it's a mix TBH Jack, I've seen many courses that keep things super useful but don't reflect how things work in the real world if that makes sense?

I like a course that introduces a concept and you build something super simple then quickly move onto doing this in a real world setting.

Yeah I think were both in agreement with that. I do find it's often useful to work on a mini project after any course to let it sink in a bit more. It doesn't have to be much, as time is often hard to get, but if you're not doing anything to apply what you've learnt you're basically just following along.

Anyone that has been doing tutorials for 2 years, making little to no progress, has been doing exactly that. They haven't worked on anything to reinforce what they've just read or watched, and it's very easy to forget everything, making it difficult to apply in any real-world use case. At least if you've written something that uses parts or some of what you've learned, you can draw from some experience.

I believe that once the obstacle of coding goes away things become much easier, people start to think newer strategies to find best possible solution, and their work starts to improve.