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?
It took me a long time to realize the worth of having a CS degree. When I was leaving the school, I felt like it hasn’t tought me much. I was already a pretty ok programmer, since I was programming most of my highschool, and it felt like I’ve wasted a lot of time on languages I’ll never see in my entire life. Which is kind of true - I’m still pretty confident that I’ll never use Lisp, Prolog, Lambda Calcul, base assembly or Pharo ever again, but after a few years I’ve realized something important that I was missing - the school wasn’t trying to teach me how to be a “pharo/lisp/prolog programmer”, but to be “a programmer”.
I noticed it on my pentesting colleagues who didn’t have formal programming education, how they mostly spoke about programming in relation to languages - “I know a little bit of python, but wouldn’t call myself a programmer. What programmer are you?”. That question felt wierd, and I eventualy realized that’s because the lines between languages eventually blured for me naturally, and I paid no mind to the language of choice - I was simply able to naturally pick up any language, and write anything I needed in it pretty quickly.
Only then it occured to me that I have my education to thank for that. Sure, I might never use Lisp again, but I do vaguely remember the concepts and workflow the language has, so now I can more naturally pick up any lisp-like language. Same goes for the prolog-style of languages, or the more OOP-focused languages, like Pharo. Since I had to drag myself through hell to pass an exam in most of the flavours of languages, it made me a versatile programmer that can just naturally pick up anything I see, to the point where I don’t have to think about it - I just subconsciously detect what kind of basic workflow style is it going for, google the basic syntax and standard libraries, and I can write whatever I need in whatever language is available in a reasonable amount of time.
I don’t see this “ascendance” mentioned in the post, and I think that it’s a really important point in learning to be a programmer. It’s also a piece of advice I try to give anyone unsure about whether his degree is worth it, because it feels like you’re learning useless stuff. I have no idea how to teach it, though. It kind of happened naturally for me, and I can’t identify the point when it happened or why, or how would I go in teaching it to someone else.
It’s important to keep a wide field of view when learning programming, and not just lock yourself into one language. You can always google for syntax pretty quickly, but seeing the wide array of workflows and flavours different languages use to accomplish the same thing will go a long way in making you a better programmer.
I started programing at such a young age that I don’t even remember how it went. Makes it difficult to teach as I find it hard to relate to newbies. I’m quite used to just learning my self and sometimes hitting roads that lead to nowhere. In the past that I actually remember, I’ve only been learning new paradigms, deepening my understanding of low level stuff and mastering my art. Hardly stuff I can give along to a newbie.
I never found it that hard… But I also never expected to just know everything. Coding is life-long learning. People who see it as “a thing to learn once” struggle a lot more I think. They also start to fall behind at some point.
100%. I also never found it that hard but I’ve been doing this 20 years now and I’m still learning. I look back at what I did a year ago and I probably wouldn’t write it the same today. I’ve worked with people who don’t seem to have learned anything in 10 years and it baffles me.
Im not sure if this helps anyone but I used to tell my jr devs the same thing:
- You got the job.
- You are now a developer.
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 think it s easier. Get a problem you want to solve > press buttons as best a syou can > get something working > congrats.
Then by doing you will learn how to get better.
I started with the desert, reached the cliff only to turn back to the desert, through a community school parking lot, and now I am just hiding under a rock in a hole for now.
This is all predicated on the assumption that people already have a familiarity with organizing their thoughts and intentions in a way that even have a prayer of being understood by a machine.
There are a lot of ways people innately organize their thoughts. Some of them translate much more easily than others to code.
For some people, even step 1 is a hurdle that there are insufficient resources to clear.
Over a year in as a junior dev and I’m still in the second stage. I did 6 months backend and now I’m now entering my 6th month as frontend. I still know so little, but I know more than I did yesterday.
My biggest challenges:
- I don’t know what questions to ask when it’s about something I don’t know.
- Having a rough idea as to how I want to try and solve a problem, but not knowing how to code it
- Trying to retain so much new information on a daily basis and then remember everything from the days before
- (What I hope is) Imposter Syndrome on a weekly basis
I just keep on trying, try to understand what I can and ask for help when I feel I’m at a blocker.
If you don’t know, ask a stupid question to yourself. Then ask it again in a more intelligent manner to a rubber duck. Then a real person. One of these three will give you an answer
TDD is the answer to the second part. Seriously, just try it. Don’t do it for every task after, but do try it!
Notes, tickets, knowleadge bases, READMEs, well written code that is easy to understand, tests that are descriptive, ADRs. Nobody can remember it all, the hard part of programming is making it easy for the next change. Remember it’s likely to be you, be kind to your future self
And imposter syndrome never goes away. And this is a good thing - “don’t get cocky kid”. It does get lesser though, and then you get more responsibilities! But really, if you aren’t questioning why and what you are doing, how do you trust your past self? Embrace the imposter, realise we are all imposters to a lot of extents
Thanks for this, almost every day can be a challenge but that’s what I signed up for when I switched to software development! I’ll keep what you’ve said in mind and try to put it to practice 🙂
I did not go through those phases.
Definitely 4 but stage 2 always comes back, it’s just not as emotional anymore
Very accurate. Working for a small dev shop with sympathetic senior team members brought me through 2 and into the start of 3. But a job change (into something I only barely qualified for) meant I had to trek phase 3 alone. It’s a loong slog, and the myriad of technologies in the intro without ever feeling like you know anything is spot on (I would frequently be reading web pages for help only to pull my hair out at how often they mentioned things I should know but didn’t). Fortunately I had gone to work for an IT team embedded in a larger company, not a software company itself, and they had far lower standards. I don’t think that’s a good thing in general, but it did allow me to get semi hacky things done during the desert of despair and I felt like I was delivering just as often as I was floundering. The upswing of awesome is real though. I hit it about 5 or 6 years in. I found my niche, everything id been reading and studying suddenly started to reinforce one another rather than sow deeper confusion and confidence and productivity started to multiply. About 7 years in I was technical lead in a couple of business critical areas. After 8 years I started my own consultancy in those technologies and have never looked back. I take care now to give junior staff projects that stretch them, and they need to work at, but which aren’t soul crushing.
