The four phases of the typical journey into coding
- The Hand Holding Honeymoon is the joy-filled romp through highly polished resources teaching you things that seem tricky but are totally do-able with their intensive support. You will primarily learn basic syntax but feel great about your accomplishments.
- The Cliff of Confusion is the painful realization that it’s a lot harder when the hand-holding ends and it feels like you can’t actually do anything on your own yet. Your primary challenges are constant debugging and not quite knowing how to ask the right questions as you fight your way towards any kind of momentum.
- The Desert of Despair is the long and lonely journey through a pathless landscape where every new direction seems correct but you’re frequently going in circles and you’re starving for the resources to get you through it. Beware the “Mirages of Mania”, like sirens of the desert, which will lead you astray.
- The Upswing of Awesome is when you’ve finally found a path through the desert and pulled together an understanding of how to build applications. But your code is still siloed and brittle like a house of cards. You gain confidence because your sites appear to run, you’ve mastered a few useful patterns, and your friends think your interfaces are cool but you’re terrified to look under the hood and you ultimately don’t know how to get to “production ready” code. How do you bridge the gap to a real job?
Which phase are you in?
Im not sure if this helps anyone but I used to tell my jr devs the same thing:
The article somewhat goes over this but: Learning to code is a life long thing. You just keep getting better each day with practice. Im not sure about the phases though. Definitely the “job ready” portion of the article. It seems short sighted to say you need all those things and going through each of the “phases” in order to be successful. Just solve a problem. With software. Congrats!
I remind my team every year that even seniors struggle at times.
I’m now 15 years in and at least twice a month, I’m coding with 40 tabs open trying to piece together the best solution, often just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
Heh yeah. I feel that. Close to 20 now and Im starting to feel the churn. But its still a good feeling to give direction and see people grow. I used to be a team lead in addition to a senior dev…now im just a dev (being an individual contributor is fun again) and the 40 tabs bit resonates with me. I find that AI is good a surface level assignments like build basic CRUD/models…but it Fd up so hard sometimes its hard to come back from. Definition of spaghetti sometimes haha. I just go back to the old stuff that I know works.